


Chapter 1 - So it begins

by dreiklang



Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: F/M, Gen, Time Travel, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-02 01:51:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1051135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreiklang/pseuds/dreiklang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An alternate version of events in which the Master never gets caught in the time lock at ‘The End of Time’ and the Doctor doesn’t regenerate into his eleventh self. The Master hijacks the TARDIS in an attempt to escape, but gets sent back to the 19th century instead, where he is mistaken for the Doctor by an earlier version of Torchwood and becomes their prisoner as a result.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chapter 1 - So it begins

**Author's Note:**

> _This is my first attempt at fanfiction in the Doctor Who fandom, although not my first writing experience altogether, thank God. :) After two years of lurking around the fandom, reading so many amazing fics, I’ve finally decided to write one of my own. I’ve envisioned this project of mine as a two part slow burn Doctor/Master saga, the first Book portraying the Doctor’s tenth incarnation, the second dealing with his eleventh one, each Book divided into Chapters such as this one which can sometimes be read as stand-alones. The story takes place in the Doctor Who and Torchwood universe, and pretty much all episodes that have been broadcast so far are fair game, even Classic Who ones, as far as spoilers are concerned. I’ve already filled dozens of pages with the overall plotline of the Verse up to the end of Book II, so the story is pretty much complete in my head. Now I just have the gruelling task of actually writing it down and posting it, which might take some time, so, if you decide to read further, be patient with me, please. It will get done eventually. Due to the ‘slow burn’ factor I’ve insisted on, the first chapters will be mostly Gen, with other pairings occasionally. But good things come to those who wait, and I promise, I’ll get to the good stuff in the end. This first chapter is a bit dark. Well, maybe more than a bit, actually. I’ve never written explicit torture or rape before, so I’m understandably nervous about the reception it will get. But I assure you, the rest of the story won’t be as dark as this first chapter. Things will get better for our characters and they will be happy in the end, I’m going to make sure of it, don’t worry. This story is unbetaed, so any grammar mistakes left are mine, although I proof-read everything three times before posting. Well, I think I’ve bored you enough with this not so little intro, so let’s get to the actual fic. Enjoy, and feel free to tell me what you think when you’re done. :)_

_‘You are diseased._

_Be it a disease of our own making._

_You are diseased._

_You are diseased.’_

The words had stopped him dead the first time he’d heard them. Now they were playing in a loop inside his head, fuelling his rage, blending in with the rhythm of four and demanding blood. 

They’d used him. They’d taken his mind and stuck themselves inside like parasites, feeding off him, poisoning him his entire life, driving him stark raving mad, all of it just to save their sorry arses at his expense. Cowards, lying cheats, snakes, the lot of them. And now they had the gall to deny him his final reward, after he’d saved them, after he’d brought them back. They dared call him _diseased_ when they themselves were the most sickening scum to have ever graced the whole of time and space? They thought they could get away with using him like a puppet, double crossing him and throwing him away like garbage? Well, he’d make them choke on their own blood for this unforgivable insult. 

He would show them the wrath of the Master.

“Get out of the way,” he told the Doctor and didn’t even pause to appreciate the irony before he shot forth with all his might, pushing the dregs of his life force right between that bastard Rassilon’s hearts, right there, where it hurt most, where it made him stagger and wince and cringe back in pain. There, let him feel at least part of his pain, part of his torment. He would send him screaming back to hell even if he got dragged down himself. 

One, two, three, four.

The time lock was closing in around them, but all the Master could see was the great and powerful Rassilon, finally on his knees. Yes, kneeling in front of the Master, defeated, in shame. Now there was a sight worth giving up his own life for!

He amped up all he had for that last, deadly strike, the one that should do the trick and wipe that bastard out of existence for good, but he never got a chance to hit. Before he even saw it coming, Rassilon raised his arm and fired a jolt of lightning from the glove in his direction. It struck the Master straight through the chest, searing him with blinding hot pain and propelling him back a few feet, into the side of a desk. 

Through a haze of numbness, the Master watched the time lock close once more, leaving behind only an afterimage of Rassilon’s infuriating, triumphant smirk.

Then he lost all perception of self for a while. 

_So this is what it feels like to die._

He could have given up right then and there, for the first time in his life just accept that he, too, had an end, like everything else. But, instead, he fought his way back to consciousness again. He would not let himself just give up like that, not while the drums kept calling to him from the back of his mind, like the rhythm of a Time Lord’s hearts, like life itself still gripping tight to his soul. They hadn’t left him, the drums, they hadn’t abandoned him even now, so he wouldn’t abandon them either.

He struggled to push himself up, forced control into his limbs and breathed through the pain radiating from his chest into the rest of his body. He blinked the blood from his eyes just in time to see the Doctor step into one of the Vinvocci radiation cells, freeing the old human geezer from the other side. He took one look at the blinking alert on the control panel and understood what that idiot was doing. As he watched the Doctor crumple to the ground in pain, he mentally cursed the man for his sheer stupidity. How dare he throw away one of his regenerations for a saggy old decrepit human who, from the looks of him, would keel over soon anyway, while the Master stood here gasping his last breath? That insufferable git had life to spare, and this was what he chose to do with it? 

The machine finally shut down and the Doctor staggered out, skin aglow with the first signs of regeneration. He wouldn’t have much time now.

“What’s happening, Doctor?” Wilfred asked, watching the skin knit back over the Time Lord’s wounds.

“A new face, a new man,” the Doctor straightened, face resolute. “Just like I told you.”

“But you can’t, Doctor,” the man pleaded. “You can’t die! Not because of me.”

“I’ve run away from this for so long, but now it’s time to finally let go,” the Doctor sighed. “There’s nothing I can do about it. Take care of Donna for me, will you, Wilf? She was brilliant. You both were.”

Wilfred grabbed the Doctor into a tight hug, tears flowing down his face, and over the human’s shoulder, where he didn’t think he could be seen, the Doctor let some of his despair show through as well. The Master saw real fear on his face, and he felt like cursing all over again because of it. The Doctor wasn’t supposed to look like that, like a scared little boy, and he wouldn’t be if he hadn’t pulled that stupid stunt only to save a worthless ape. What honour could be found in this, dying _after_ a battle, by your own hand?

“You might want to step back for this, Wilf,” the Doctor said, downing his unflappable mask again and pulling back altogether from the man.

He stood there, in the middle of the room, artron energy suffusing his skin with gold, gathering itself for the coming transformation.

“Oh no, you don’t!” the Master growled and by sheer force of will, pushed himself to his feet and launched forward.

Just as the golden energy exploded out through the Doctor’s flesh, the Master tackled him to the ground and pressed his mouth to his, absorbing the flow of energy into himself.

For one short, blissful moment, it felt like the best kind of death, all that power surging through him, like the collapse of a supernova inside a black hole. It fed the neverending hunger in him, flooded his dying cells in a burst of such vitality that he had never experienced before, not once during his own regenerations, this all-encompassing sensation of _life._

And then it stopped. 

The Master pulled away to look upon the face of his greatest enemy, the bane of his existence, his true equal and opposite. He was alive. Unconscious on the floor and wearing the same face, but still alive. Oh, the Master could kill him so easily right now, this was his perfect chance. Be done with him once and for all and never have to listen to one of those sanctimonious, holier-than-thou rants ever again, never have any more plans foiled by his meddling. _He_ would be the last of the Time Lords then, the one who got to conquer and rule the universe as was his birthright, and no one in the whole of space and time would ever come close to stopping him, ever again. 

...But where would be the fun in that? 

He ran the pad of his thumb over one of the sleeping man’s eyebrows.

_“Wonder what I’d be, without you.”..._

“What did you do to him, you barmy bastard?” Wilfred’s voice shook him out of his reverie.

The Master straightened up and got to his feet, feeling his body sing with renewed strength.

“Oh, he’s just taking a little nap, aren’t you, Doctor?” he said, delivering a kick to the Doctor’s ribs as an afterthought. The other Time Lord stayed unmoving.

“But you, Wilfred,” he turned to the man with a predatory sneer. “I’ve got unfinished business with _you_.”

He cracked his knuckles, taking a step towards the older man. Oh, it felt glorious, just being able to crack his fingers like that. His entire body was so alive! And the momentary look of fear that crossed the old human’s face was like a soothing balm to his drums.

Before he even got the chance to devise the most inventive approach to end this human’s pitiful life, he heard sirens in the distance, a lot of them, getting closer and closer to the house. Oh, brilliant, just what he needed, to get shot or possibly arrested by these apes. 

“Change of plans, Wilfred!” he clapped his hands cheerfully and grabbed the old man by the scruff of his shirt. “You’re going to tell me where the good Doctor here left his TARDIS.”

“I’m not telling you a thing!” the man yelped.

“Would you rather prefer a slow and painful death instead, Wilfred?” he asked, pleasantly.

“Oh, I don’t know about slow,” the old man got ballsy as he too heard the approaching sirens. “It looks to me that time isn’t really on your side right now, and I’m not afraid of death.”

“What if I kill him?” he nodded towards the Doctor, still gripping tight to Wilfred’s coat.

“Well go on then, I’m sure the Doctor would rather die than let you get a hold of his ship!”

That human was too bloody annoying for his own good, but the Master didn’t really have the time to deal with him now. So he pulled out the proverbial ace out of his sleeve. He let go of the man and rushed to one of the side doors of Naismith’s office, going inside.

“Maybe this will loosen up your tongue a bit, huh, Wilfred?” he smirked and pushed out a rolling office chair, where an unconscious Donna sat strapped with a set of leather binds around her ankles and arms. The Master knew she’d come in handy.

“Donna!” the old man rushed forward, all the bluster gone from him now.

“Ah, ah, ah!” the Master cautioned, wrapping one hand around the woman’s throat. “Come any closer, and I’ll snap her neck.”

“What have you done to her, you bastard?”

“Six billion of me running around on your planet and you thought we had all forgotten about your little granddaughter here? You certainly didn’t give her a second thought when you buggered off into space with the Doctor before.”

“Please, let her go, ” the old man pleaded. “I’ll tell you everything you want!”

“I knew you would eventually see reason, _Wilf._ You can start by telling me the location of the TARDIS. Chop, chop! Or, if you prefer, _snap, snap_!” he yanked sharply on Donna’s hair to prove his point.

“Alright, alright!” the man yelled fearfully. “It’s down in the stables.”

“Oh, the stables,” the Master snorted. “How quaint. What else?”

“What do you mean ‘what else’? There isn’t anything else!”

“Oh, come on, Wilfred, you really don’t want to piss me off by lying now, do you?” He could see it in the other man’s eyes that there was more to it than he was letting on. He yanked on Donna’s hair again.

“The Doctor did something to it, made it vanish with his keys! That’s all I know, I swear! Now let her go, please, let my Donna go!” the man was all but crying and shaking with fear. The sight pleased him so much that the Master decided to be merciful for once, if only for the entertainment value of the old goat.

“Keys, huh?” he thought aloud. “Catch!” he said and thrust the chair forward on its wheels, careening it right into the old man, and sending both him and his passed out granddaughter into a heap on the floor.

He wasted no time in frisking the Doctor’s pockets for his keys, and when he finally found them, he darted out the door towards the stables on Naismith’s estate. As he fled for the cover of the smaller building on the western side of the estate, he could hear police cars pulling up near the house and a couple of voices shouting at him to stop. He didn’t pay them any mind.

He stumbled to a halt inside the stable, scanning it for any sign of the ship, but of course, he could see none, the cloaking the Doctor must have used worked spot on. 

“Come out, come out, wherever you are.” He took a look at the keys and noticed a small remote control dangling from the chain. He pushed one of the buttons and suddenly, the TARDIS winked into existence a few feet from him down the aisle.

“One second out of synch, oh, that is clever,” the Master smirked. That’s why his scanners hadn’t picked anything up.

Another pushed button and the door swung open with two beeps, like the humans’ cars did here on Earth. 

“Stupid sentimental sod,” he muttered disgustedly. 

Well, he wasn’t going to waste one more minute here on this backwater lump of dirt, so he quickly got inside, slamming the door behind him.

“Hello, you old rust bucket! Did you miss me?” he sneered, rushing to the console to start her up.

The lights in the console room dimmed a few degrees and a faint psychic wave of hostility washed over his mind. Not so glad to see him then, not that the Master was in any way arsed to care.

He promptly began to pull switches and turn knobs, powering the TARDIS up, but something wasn’t right, the ship wasn’t responding like she should have. All his commands got scrambled, every pathway he opened just diverged in the opposite direction or closed down on him altogether. The bloody ship was actually fighting him!

“Come on, you sodding piece of junk, listen to your Master!”

The Doctor must have done something to the controls, implanted some kind of defence mechanism. Looked like the Doctor had learned his lesson the first time the Master had stolen his ship. Oh well, he’d sort the old rust bucket out later, he was sure of it, and give her a piece of his mind for good measure. But, for now, he just needed to get off this fucking planet before the Doctor woke up and found a way to thwart his escape again. 

“Come on, come on!” he yelled in frustration as he implemented strings of code into the machine faster than the bitch could override them. 

And then finally, finally, the TARDIS began to dematerialize.

“About fucking time!” he kicked one lever into place with his foot.

The ship shuddered and groaned around him and he lost his balance more than once as he tried to plot the course. Damn, but the bitch was prickly. What the hell had the Doctor done to her anyway? He’d never gotten so much trouble from a TARDIS in his entire life!

With a final yank that sent him sprawling to the floor, the TARDIS landed and the engines shut down. And of course she hadn’t gone where she was supposed to, like a good little ship. Oh, the Master was going to whip her into shape, just she wait. He grudgingly got up off his arse and checked the monitor.

_November 27th 1897 A.D., Cardiff, Great Britain, Earth._

Oh, great, just bloody great! He was still on Earth, and in Cardiff of all places! Throw in good old Captain Freak for good measure, and it would be just like old times. The Master cursed under his breath. He tried to power up the engines once again, but this time the TARDIS refused to budge even one bit. It looked like she had gone into some sort of stasis, he couldn’t even feel that faint niggling of resentment at the back of his mind anymore. She had put herself under just to spite him.

Oh, well, if she wanted to do this the hard way... He opened the panel under the console where he knew the Doctor kept his toolbox – the Master had made good use of that during the paradox year – and pulled the heavy metal box out. He would rewire the bitch’s circuits so hard she wouldn’t even remember her own make by the time he was finished with her. He started rifling through the items inside – everything piled haphazardly like the chaos the Doctor’s mind usually was – throwing things aside, looking for something he could use. He was just about to throw another object over his shoulder when he stopped to take a better look at it and his mouth fell open in shock.

It was his old laser screwdriver. The Doctor had kept it. That sentimental fool, he’d actually kept it! He quickly checked the device over and saw that one of its best features, the Lazarus aging technology, had been removed from the settings. 

“Bit too traumatic for you, Doctor? Wanted to pretend like you didn’t spend a whole year as a shrivelled up carcass, did you?”

But that was neither here nor there, the screwdriver should do the trick. He was just opening up the inside of the ship’s console, gearing up for a long session of tough love, when four successive knocks on the door startled him out of his glee.

He frowned at the TARDIS’ exit, wondering who the hell might come knocking on his door. The sound came up again, the same four beat rhythm, only more urgent, and, yeah, now the Master was really curious and maybe a bit freaked. The external scanners were conspicuously offline, so he couldn’t see a thing. He got up from his crouch and made his way to the door. He paused, pressing his right ear against the faux wooden panel, and listened to the silence on the other side.

One-two-three-four! 

The knocks made him jump back, startled, and then curse himself for his stupidity. He would simply go outside and blast a hole right through the brainless sod that dared to disturb him from his work. Problem solved.

Still clutching his laser screwdriver in his left hand, he angrily pushed the door open, ready to inflict serious bodily harm on the culprit, but to his surprise, he couldn’t see anyone in front or even in the vicinity of the ship. All he could see were a few grimy barracks scattered over what looked like a docking area in the bay that would later become Roald Dahl Plass, and an eerie kind of stillness that only night-time on a primitive planet like this could bring. 

He didn’t just imagine it, did he? Oh, no, somebody was playing some sort of game with him. He grinned evilly. Well, the Master would show them a game of his own, a very slow and painful one. He stepped out of the ship, letting the door close behind him – he wouldn’t want some bloody ape hijack the TARDIS while his back was turned, now, did he? That would be something only a git like the Doctor would fall for – and he took two paces away to get a better vantage of his potential target.

He didn’t even make it that far before he suddenly felt a sharp sting in the back of his neck and his legs buckled under him. _Oh, bollocks!_ And here he’d just been bragging about how he _wouldn’t_ fall for something like that. He pulled the poison dart out of his neck and tried to spin around to see his attacker, but he found he no longer had control over his limbs and he fell to the ground with a curse.

“Good work, Jonas,” a woman’s voice said, and the laser screwdriver was kicked out of his hand. 

Two faces came into his rapidly darkening view, and he could make out the features of a tall black man holding a blowtube and a young brunette woman in period dress leaning over him.

“Hello, Doctor,” the woman smirked.

The only thought the Master had as darkness took him over completely was: 

_‘Oh, bugger! Could this day get any worse?’_

 

***

 

He swam his way to consciousness through the thick waves of darkness that clung to him. Darkness never seemed to want to let him go. If he were philosophically inclined right now, he would laugh at the irony of that thought, but instead he grabbed hold of the four beat rhythm and followed it to the surface once more.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Doctor,” a woman’s voice spoke from somewhere above.

His head felt muddled and askew and for a second, he couldn’t remember what had happened to him, why he found himself there, lying on a cold and hard surface, his muscles so oddly unresponsive to his commands. He blinked through the blinding light that shone over his face and saw two women standing above him, both of them human and wearing clothes belonging to a long bygone era. And he recognised the brunette on the left as the one who had attacked him before. Then everything came back in a rush.

“You!” he growled, and tried to lunge forward to grab her, but his hands and feet were caught in some sort of restraints and he couldn’t move. He looked down at himself and saw that he was strapped to an antiquated wooden examination table, and that realisation only made him angrier. How dare these primitive apes treat him with such disrespect?

“Now, now, Doctor, no need to get testy,” the blonde woman on the right smiled.

“Stop calling me that,” he spat, glaring at them. “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Emily Holroyd,” the blonde spoke with a proud grin. “And Alice Guppy, my second in command. We’re Torchwood.”

“Oh, bloody great,” the Master sighed and let his head thunk against the table.

“So you’ve heard of us?” the woman, Holroyd, seemed surprised. “That is good, Doctor, because we’ve heard a lot about you as well.”

“I am not the Doctor, you stupid ape!” he yelled and got a smack across his cheek from the brunette woman for all his trouble.

“Watch your tongue there, alien boy,” Guppy warned.

“Thank you, Alice,” Holroyd nodded, then fixed her eyes back on the Master. “He is just as rude as the stories make him out to be.”

“Look, this is obviously a case of mistaken identity,” the Master tried a different approach. “So just let me go and we’ll forget all about it, alright? No harm done.”

The two women burst into laughter.

“Oh, and we’ll just take your word for that now, shall we?” Holroyd mocked. “You came here in your vanishing blue box, you are obviously an alien and you had in your possession the object you have before referred to as your ‘sonic screwdriver’. The only thing missing is your human companion, one Dame Rose Tyler of the Powell Estates. Where is she, Doctor?”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I am not the Doctor!” the Master tried to breathe through his anger. It was making the drums heighten in pitch and he needed to think clearly, he needed to talk his way out of this. The room around him looked like some kind of underground holding cell, and if the operating table and the crude medical instruments on a shelf near the door were anything to go by, these people meant business. He couldn’t afford to lose his temper now.

Come on, think, think! What did he know about 21st century Torchwood? They’d had a strict policy of ‘if it’s alien, it’s ours’ until the Cyberman and Dalek debacle in 2006 when the Freak took over the reins, but before that... The Master had never taken the time to study the old files, he had been more interested in the present threat of the Institute, but he could remember a copy of the original charter he’d rifled through once. Aww, crap. Realisation hit him hard. In the beginning, the main reason the institute existed was to apprehend and contain the enemy of the Crown called the Doctor. And now they thought the Master was _him_. Damn it all to hell!

“Look,” he tried again. “Since you know so much about the Doctor, you must have some sort of description of the guy, right? Do I look like the Doctor to you?”

“Indeed, you look different than the statements given by Queen Victoria describe,” Holroyd said. “But we’ve learned a few more things about you since then. For example, we know your species has the ability to change their appearance. We also have extensive records dating back to the Roman Empire describing three different incarnations of you, all of which called themselves ‘the Doctor’ and all of which travelled in the same blue box and left chaos and mayhem in their wake. So that argument won’t work with us, Doctor. We know you can travel in time, and we know you can disguise yourself to avoid detection, but this time, your luck has run out.”

“You’re making a big mistake,” the Master said in a low, dangerous voice. He was getting tired of these stupid bitches giving him the third degree, especially about something that he hadn’t even done. Add to that the indignity of being confused with the Doctor of all people... “Let me go right now, and maybe you’ll still get to keep your lives.”

“Oh, threatening us now, are you?” Guppy laughed. “Seems we were right to catch you when we did.”

“What were you planning to do here on Earth, Doctor?” Holroyd bent closer to his face. “Why did you come here? What insidious alien plot did you have planned for us this time?”

“For the last time, I am not the Doctor, you filthy human scum!” he snapped, the incessant beat of four wiping away any threads of patience he had left. “I am the Master, and when I get out of here, I will skin the both of you alive! I will make you beg and curse the day you were born!”

“Yes, that’s right, Doctor, let it all out,” Guppy encouraged. 

“You think we are inferior to you, you see yourself as the rightful master of the human race, don’t you?” Holroyd whispered in his right ear.

“You came here to enslave us, to take over Earth. That was your plan all along, wasn’t it?” Guppy challenged from the other side.

“Admit it, admit what we have always known. You are here to destroy us all, aren’t you, Doctor?” Holroyd insisted.

“Yes, I will wipe your whole accursed race from the face of this planet!” the Master yelled, so furious now that his entire body thrummed with the need to spill blood. “I can’t stand the sight of you filthy, primitive apes! Animals, the lot of you! You make me sick!”

“It stings, doesn’t it?” Holroyd asked in a singsong voice. “To be defeated by us ‘filthy apes’. To know that we have thwarted your plans, to know that we have outsmarted the great and powerful Doctor.”

“I am the Master, you stupid bitch!” he spat. “And I will make you pay! Just you wait till I get out of here, I will feed you your entrails and make you choke on your own blood!”

He started thrashing against his restraints, the drums deafening every trace of rational thought except the need to kill.

“My, my, what a nasty temper you’ve got,” Guppy mocked. “Pity your claws aren’t just as sharp as your words.”

“You see, that is where you’re wrong, Doctor,” Holroyd said indulgently. “You will never get out of here again.” She turned her head to the side. “Mr. Moore!”

A middle aged, plain looking man wearing a white coat came into the room holding a syringe.

“I think our prisoner needs a little time out, don’t you agree?” she asked.

“Indeed, Miss Holroyd,” he took his cue from his boss seamlessly and approached the table.

“No, no! Don’t you dare!” the Master began to squirm in earnest.

“Hush now, _‘Master’_ ,” Guppy said mockingly. “Don’t kick up a fuss.”

The medic caught the Master’s hair in one hand and yanked his head to the side, then plunged the needle into his throat. A few seconds after, he felt both his body and mind go numb once again. _‘Oh, bollocks, I’ve really done it now,_ ’ was the last coherent thought before he fell asleep.

 

***

 

The next time the Master woke up, he found himself strapped to a wooden chair, not unlike those used to execute criminals by electrocution in Earth’s not so distant past. As a matter of fact, he could see an electroshock device just a few feet to his right. Things didn’t bode very well from the looks of it. Why, oh why, couldn’t he keep his mouth shut? He always got in trouble when he lost his temper like that. Bloody Torchwood. Stupid, insolent pricks. No matter the time zone, they were always a pain in his arse.

The door to the dank, mouldy cell opened to allow Holroyd and Guppy inside, the dark skinned man from before pushing a trolley with what appeared to be items meant for torture into the room. Things just kept getting better and better.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” Holroyd said cheerfully, stopping with her arms crossed to look down at him. Pompous bitch.

“Look, I may have overreacted a little before,” the Master tried the reasonable approach again. “I was clearly in a state of confusion brought about by the sedative you dosed me with, and I said some things that might have seemed... offensive at the time, but I assure you, I mean no harm to your planet or your race and I am definitely not the Doctor. I am just passing through, had some problems to sort out with my ship’s navigation and that is the reason for the pit stop here in your lovely city. This has all been a great misunderstanding, so if you let me go, I’ll get out of your hair and everything will be sorted out.”

“If you are not the Doctor, then how come you’re travelling in his ship?” Guppy asked.

“There is a very good explanation for that,” he hedged.

“We would be very interested to hear it,” Holroyd smirked.

“I stole it, alright?” he decided for the truth. “Now, all I want is to fix my engines and get the hell off this planet for good. I don’t know why you’re after the Doctor and frankly I don’t give a damn, but all this has nothing to do with me. Just let me go, and we’ll put all of this behind us. What do you say?”

If he fully intended to dismember every last one of these apes once he was set free, well, that was nobody’s business but his own.

“Oh, Doctor, or whomever the hell you really are,” Holroyd sighed condescendingly. “You clearly don’t get it, do you?” She shook her head. “You see, it doesn’t really make a difference now whether you are the Doctor or not. You are a hostile alien who came to Earth with murderous intent, which you have made very clear to us earlier. You can’t just expect us to let you go free now, can you?”

“As I’ve told you before, I have no intention of murdering anyone and I’m not here to take over Earth. As a matter of fact, all I want is to leave and never see hide nor hair of this planet again. Isn’t that what you want as well? To get rid of me?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” Holroyd exclaimed. “We are very pleased to have you here as our guest, you, and especially your time travelling blue box. The knowledge and technology you possess will make the finest acquisition for the good and everlasting prosperity of the Empire. You will teach us everything you know, starting with the way to unlock and operate your time ship.”

“And if I refuse?” the Master asked.

“Then we will get that information out of you by any means we see fit, whether you like it or not,” Holroyd answered. 

“Is that so?” the Master sneered. He couldn’t believe the gall of these humans, thinking they could threaten and hold him prisoner just for fun.

“If it’s alien, it’s ours. _You_ are an alien.” Guppy deadpanned. “Draw the logical conclusion from that.”

“The only conclusion I’m going to draw will be your tongue, on a stick, shoved up your arse along with your eyeballs when I get my hands on you,” he told her stiltedly, feeling the anger rise up inside him again.

The two women giggled. They fucking giggled, like naughty schoolgirls gearing up for a prank.

“So you won’t consider our proposition, then?” Holroyd asked.

“Tell you all my secrets and get killed, or not tell you a bloody thing and get tortured, then killed? Hmm, let me think about it... That would be a big, fat _‘no’_!” he snapped.

“Very well, then,” Holroyd said, unperturbed, and picked up a pair of electrodes from the table at her right. “We’ll see if we can’t make you change your mind.”

Fifteen minutes later and a series of increasingly vicious electric shocks to his system, the Master resolutely kept his face straight. He would not give these apes the satisfaction of hearing him scream.

“Ready to talk yet?” Holroyd asked, resting her hand on the lever of the machine.

“You know what’s the first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here?” the Master smiled lopsidedly, catching his breath. “I’m going to go back in time, find your mother and shove my cock up her arse!”

The woman’s eyes flashed with unsuppressed fury and she backhanded him swiftly across the face. Oh, yeah, that definitely ruffled her feathers good.

“You, you... filthy swine!” she exclaimed, getting red in the face. Then she visibly reined herself in and turned to the black man who had been waiting near the door. “Jonas, you take a turn at him, I’m going to get myself a cup of tea.”

“With pleasure,” the man grinned, white teeth contrasting predatorily against his dark countenance as he approached.

Holroyd stormed out of the room in a huff, skirt billowing behind her, and the Master laughed with infinite glee.

“Well come on, Jonas, show me what you’ve got,” he goaded.

The first punch landed straight on his nose, breaking it and causing a flow of blood to spill into his mouth, but the Master just laughed through the pain. He carried on laughing as the blows grew more and more savage, until his lungs could no longer push air through his throat, until his vision started to grey out and he fell into unconsciousness with one skilfully placed hit to his right temple.

***

The Master spent the night – or, at least, what he assumed to be ‘night’ in this accursed basement – inside a cold stone cell, devoid of any furniture, with only a hole in the ground connecting directly to the sewer and a rusty metal tap in lieu of any bathroom facilities, and a barred prison door. He didn’t go back to sleep after he’d woken from his blackout, just sat there, healing his mostly superficial wounds and thinking things through. He knew the situation was only going to go from bad to worse if he didn’t figure out a way to get out of there soon. These people had obviously apprehended his TARDIS and his laser screwdriver. At least he hadn’t taken the Doctor’s keys with him when he’d left the ship, this way the bastards couldn’t get inside. This could prove problematic for him as well when he found his ship again, but, no matter, he could rig something up with the help of his trusty screwdriver. All he needed to do was escape, and maybe take some of these bastards down along the way. He would definitely enjoy wringing those bitches’ scrawny necks for making him suffer such an indignity. They had shackled his left ankle to the wall, the iron chain having enough give to allow him to walk a few paces inside the small room. These primitives had no taste. Even the collar and leash he’d been made to wear at the Naismith mansion had had more class than this. That’d been Abigail’s idea, kinky little cunt that she was – the Master would have liked to explore what other tricks she had up her sleeve. Oh, well, he just needed to assess the situation here, and then devise the best plan of action, the sooner the better.

Five hours later by his internal count, Jonas and two armed guards came to move him to the examination room he’d seen the previous day, one level above that of the cells, where Holroyd and the medic were already waiting. They had apparently stocked the room with even more medical devices over night.

In spite of his fairly vocal protests, they stripped him of his clothes and tied him to the table, dosed him with a mild sedative to keep him subdued and the doctor began his medical exam.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the medic told Holroyd in an excited voice. “The cuts and bruises from yesterday have all but completely healed! The subject obviously has some accelerated healing abilities, the blood and tissue samples will probably tell us more...”

“He was particularly resistant to the electric shocks we administered as well,” Holroyd added. “Mind you, he does feel pain, but the threshold is much above that of a normal human being, and even some of the other aliens we’ve had in here before. I’ll be very interested to explore that in depth during his stay with us.” He could practically hear the smirk in her voice.

“And listen here, Miss Holroyd,” the medic enthused, passing a stethoscope over to the woman. “Two hearts!”

“Impressive indeed,” she agreed.

“I wonder what other differences there are under that skin,” the doctor couldn’t contain his delight. “He looks so much like one of us on the outside.”

“Probably a method of disguise, Mr Moore. We know for a fact that he can change his face on a whim. Who knows what else he can do? But I’m afraid I have to ask you to restrain your medical curiosity to what you can get without damaging the subject too much. We still need him for the information he can provide.”

“I understand, ma’am,” the medic seemed none too pleased with that. “But I would like to assist to your further interviewing sessions. I believe his physiological reactions will be paramount to my research.”

“Very well.”

The Master drifted in and out of consciousness as the medic pricked and prodded at every inch of his body in the name of science. Oh, how he would make him pay for that.

An hour later, they relocated him to the interrogation room down the hall, strapping him buck naked to that wooden chair before he got his wits about him again. 

_‘If I end up with splinters in my arse, I’m going to get really angry_ ,’ the Master thought fuzzily as the effects of the drug wore off. What were they dosing him with, anyway? It took a lot of firepower to bring a Time Lord down, he ought to know.

“Comfortable?” Alice Guppy grinned, sorting through the instruments on the table at her left.

“Seems to be a bit of a draft in here, actually,” he squinted up at her. “Problems with your AC?”

“Is our primitive planet not up to your alien standards, then?” she said, selecting a thin saw with a serrated blade from the table.

“Why don’t you come sit on my lap? That would definitely warm me up,” he leered.

“I have something more interesting in mind for today if you don’t mind, Doctor,” she walked around his chair, looking him up and down speculatively, like a painter in front of her still pristine canvass.

“Stop calling me that,” he snapped. “I am the Master!”

“You are master of nothing in this place,” she waved off his reply. “But since you won’t give us your real name, this one will have to do for now, alien.”

The Master eyed the blade in her hand.

“Little girls shouldn’t play with sharp things, they might get cut,” he warned.

“You know the drill, _Doctor_ ,” Guppy said. “Tell me what I need to know and I won’t make you hurt... too much.”

“I am aquiver with fright,” he deadpanned. 

“You will be when I’m done with you,” she said and ran the edge of the blade over his left shoulder, scraping the skin and letting a drop of blood trickle down his arm.

“Give me your best shot.”

And she did, she really tried her best over the next hour, bless her little soul. She clearly had a bit of knowhow and liked the sight of him painted red, but the Master had gone through much more inventive torture in his time, hell, he’d even written a few books of his own on the topic. For him, this was child’s play to pass the time while his brain gathered information about the enemy and formulated his plan.

“A bit too quiet for my taste,” she whispered in his ear as her fingers ran over the deep, ragged cut she’d scrawled across his chest. “Come on, won’t you give me a little shout?” she dug her nails into the torn flesh, a new wave of blood spilling down his torso to get caught in the coarse hair between his legs.

The Master grunted from the pain, but met her eyes over his shoulder and gave her a bloodstained grin. Time to get this show on the road.

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” he told her in as close to a seductive tone as he could manage. “Bet it gets those juices flowing to see me like this, makes you feel strong, makes you feel less like a frightened little child that’s stumbled way over her head in something she can never hope to understand.”

“Shut up!” she snapped, raking her nails deeper into the wound, making him grit his teeth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but I do,” he chided, cranking the persuasion up another notch. “You saw this as your way out, your chance to make something better of yourself, to find a place where you really belong. Instead, you just got more of the same, just nightmares on a darker level than your imagination could behold. You were running away before, but now you have nowhere left to hide. What are you going to do, Alice? The shadows will always find you, and they will always tear you apart.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she rounded on him and punched him in the face, eyes glistening with long forgotten fear.

“Who’s the one waiting for you in the shadows, Alice? Who hid there for the first time, so long ago and made you bleed? Who are you really running from?”

“Shut your sodding mouth or I’ll shut it for you!” the woman brought the knife up, her hand now shaking and a mad glint shining in her eyes. Oh, yes, the turmoil she was projecting was nothing short of delicious.

 _“Hush little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,”_ the Master began to sing.

With an ungodly scream of rage, Alice Guppy swung the blade forward and it would have severed his head right off if Emily Holroyd hadn’t suddenly appeared at her side, alerted by the medic, and caught hold of her arm in midair.

“Alice, stop!” she grabbed the other woman around the waist and tried to push her back.

“No, it’s, it’s _him_!... You _bastard_!” she shouted, fighting the hold, tears running down her face, smearing the few droplets of the Master’s blood that had spattered there during the interrogation.

“It’s not him, Alice!” Holroyd took the knife and threw it away, dragging the woman towards the door. “Remember where you are now. Mr Moore, a little help here!” she called over her shoulder to the medic who just stood there gaping from the sidelines.

The Master sat back in his chair and laughed, a cruel, delighted cackle at the chaos he’d wrought.

“Made you scream first, little Alice.” And then just kept on laughing with glee.

Holroyd looked at him then for the first time with something approaching fear.

“Shut him up! Get him back to his cell!” she ordered Jonas and the two guards, then she disappeared down the hall with Alice and the doctor.

 _‘Oh, that was way too easy,_ ’ the Master thought with satisfaction, as the three men untied him and dragged him back to his cell, proving not at all reluctant with their punches along the way. 

These lower life forms had such rubbish mental defences that unearthing a traumatic childhood memory or two was piece of cake for someone like the Master. Filthy apes would learn a thing or two about what real torture meant, and he would be more than happy to provide.

 

***

 

“You’ve been a really naughty boy, Doctor,” Emily Holroyd smiled sweetly from the doorway. “Speaking out of place, disobeying your betters.”

“My name is the Master, and you stupid humans are no better than ants, just waiting for someone to stomp you into the ground,” the Master slurred through the haze of the sedative, half restrained and half held upright by Jonas and one of the guards.

“Tell me, alien,” the woman went on unperturbed. “How is it that you can read minds?”

“I can’t,” he lied. “People just enjoy telling me their deepest, darkest secrets. It’s my charisma, you see.”

“If you’re so talented at snatching thoughts from people’s heads, then tell me. What am I thinking right now?” Holroyd asked.

And that was the sickler right there, because, out of all the Torchwood cronies the Master had met so far, this woman was the only one not projecting any of her thoughts or emotions. Somehow, her mental barriers were stronger than most and that made her harder to read, a variable that he could not predict. Had this human undergone some kind of psychic training, or did she have abilities of her own? He couldn’t tell. His only chance would be to try and catch her unawares during a bout of some intense emotion or distress, when the mind would be more vulnerable to read, like he had done to little Alice before. That had earned him three days of solitary confinement without light or food while his captors had most likely run around like headless chickens wondering what to do about him. Even though a Time Lord’s body could withstand longer periods of deprivation than a human one, he was almost glad when the guards finally came for him, if only to break out of the sheer boredom he’d had to endure.

“Nothing to say? Now that’s a pity,” Holroyd smirked.

“Oh, I think I’ll just keep my witty remarks for the next time I see dear, sweet Alice,” he said. “I’m dying to hear more about how daddy made her get down on her knees. Good wank material, that.”

“You’ve got a real potty mouth on you, Doctor,” she just shook her head, trying to ignore his remark. “All those rude comments, all the time. I think I’ll just have to wash your mouth out with soap.”

She gave a brief nod at the two men who promptly grabbed the Master by the hair and dunked his head into the water basin that they had brought in especially for the occasion. They kept him under for a minute during which he held his breath easily, then yanked him back out.

“Oh, good, I really needed a proper rinse,” he grinned, blinking moisture out of his eyes. “The water pressure in this place is just horrid.”

“Then you won’t mind a second one,” she gestured and the men dunked him again. 

“How long, Mr Moore?” Holroyd asked after a while.

“Three minutes, fourteen seconds and counting,” the grizzled man answered, looking between his stopwatch and the Master. “And he’s just standing there, not even a twitch. Remarkable!”

The guards pulled him out again, and the Master shook his hair excitedly.

“Invigorating!” he exclaimed with a large, shit eating grin.

“I think further tests are in order, don’t you, Mr Moore?” Holroyd asked.

“Oh, definitely!” the medic nodded eagerly.

So they held him under again. The Master was thoroughly amused by their pitiful attempts. After a while, he let his respiratory bypass kick in and just relaxed, waiting it out.

Ten minutes later, when they pulled him up, both Holroyd and the medic looked more than a little surprised. 

“How did you do that?” Moore asked, brimming with scientific excitement. Holroyd looked like she might pout, seeing that her stunt hadn’t paid off.

The Master just laughed under his breath.

“Do you think this is a joke?” Holroyd bristled on cue.

“Oh no, my dear,” the Master grinned tauntingly. “I think you are a joke. Trying to act so tough, like you’re queen of the castle, ticking off all the clichés in the book. You apes have no imagination, do you? Of course, you don’t even have half a brain, so I guess that’s understandable.”

“You know what?” Holroyd said in a clipped tone, reining in her anger. “You babble on and on, baiting and belittling every one of us, bragging about your ‘superior’ alien intellect and how primitive we are, but the truth is, Doctor, that here and now, you belong to us. We have you, we have your ship, your life is in my hands, to do with it as I please. The only reason you are still alive right now is because I believe you have knowledge that we might use, but make no mistake, if you continue to oppose me, you will be dealt with once and for all. My people will find a way to get inside your ship with or without your help, we have all the time in the world, and frankly I would be more than glad to be rid of an alien filth like you, so do not delude yourself that you are indispensable. Now, the next time you open your mouth, you had better tell me something useful, or else I will be forced to demonstrate once again who exactly is in charge here.”

“Oh, by all means, demonstrate away,” the Master scoffed. “If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that you will never get inside my ship, or my head, and when I get out of here, I will be more than glad to pay you back in kind for your insolence.”

“I think I’ve had just about enough of this,” Holroyd said. “Jonas, open his mouth.”

The dark skinned man grabbed his face and tried to force his jaw down, which the Master rewarded with a vicious bite to the man’s finger, breaking the skin and making it bleed. The goon punched him in the stomach and he finally let go of the finger, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

“If you wanted to put something in my mouth, all you had to do was ask,” he leered at them.

“Oh, I’ll put something in your mouth alright,” Holroyd glared. “Tie him to the chair.”

After a brief struggle, they managed to restrain him. Jonas pulled out a knife from his boot and used it to pry his teeth apart, then fixed his jaw in place with a metal retractor. At Holroyd’s encouragement, he then shoved a tin funnel into his open mouth and pinched his nostrils so he couldn’t breathe. With a malicious glint in her eyes, Holroyd picked up the half empty bucket of water they’d used to fill up the basin and held it up.

“Let’s see how you can hold your breath through this one.”

And she started pouring the water inside. The Master clamped his larynx shut to protect his lungs and switched to respiratory bypass. The water wasn’t getting in, which seemed to piss off Holroyd even more.

“Shove it in deeper!” she ordered.

Jonas took hold of the metal funnel and pushed it further down the Master’s throat, scraping over the roof of his mouth and his tongue, and making him thrash in his chair against the bonds, but the water still refused to get through.

“Push harder, goddamn it!” Holroyd snapped.

“But, ma’am, what if...” the other guard who was keeping the Master’s head immobile looked uncertainly at her.

“Questioning my orders, Ferris? Maybe you would like to take his place.”

That shut the man up. Jonas gave the pipe another forceful shove, and the tin cut ruthlessly, tore at the soft flesh of his throat. The Master grunted in pain, feeling blood well up inside his mouth. He panicked and tried to fight them off, but couldn’t even budge because of the restraints. Finally, with one final push, the end of the pipe cut through his larynx and a wave of water suddenly flooded his throat, pouring into his stomach and his lungs. The Master tried to cough it out, but the liquid just filled him up even more. It was pure and utter hell, he could taste blood from his wounds blending in with the rust of the funnel, but the pain was the worst, his chest spasming under the onslaught and his eyes rolling madly in his head.

Holroyd just smirked as she dumped the contents of the bucket down his throat, until there was no place for the water to go anymore and it started to spill over the edges, splashing on the floor.

The Master could only hear the drums pounding madly inside his head while his lungs burned with agonizing pain. His body was going into shock, he could feel his hearts beating out of synch as even the bypass failed. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t stop it, he was going to die here at the hands of Torchwood. How the fuck did he let things get this far? He wasn’t supposed to die, he wasn’t supposed to get caught out like this by a bunch of humans, he was the Master, for fuck’s sake! This couldn’t be happening, not to him, not like this. He had to get out, oh shit, he had to get out now!

It could have been seconds or an eternity before Holroyd signalled the men to stop. They yanked the funnel out of his throat, ripping through more soft tissue along the way, and released the straps around his arms and chest.

The Master fell forward on his knees, ankles still tied to the chair, and violently began to expel the water from his stomach and lungs. The liquid burned even worse on the way out, and it took all his willpower to stay conscious enough to get rid of it all. He coughed it up, feeling like his body was being turned inside out, white, hot agony seizing at his shredded flesh. 

When he was done, he could do nothing more than lie there in a puddle of water and his own blood, gasping painfully.

“What’s the matter, Doctor? Cat got your tongue?” Holroyd asked with a self satisfied grin.

“Fuck... you!” the Master managed to gasp, thinking it was a miracle that he could speak at all through this kind of pain.

“Tie him back up!” she instructed furiously. She would not let him have the last word, not this time, she had a point to make. “Hold his head back!”

As the minions obeyed, Holroyd picked the funnel up again and walked with renewed purpose to the chair. The Master’s eyes bulged out with dread and he shook his head frantically, but the men held him in place and she shoved the blasted thing into his mouth once more. Small mercies, she didn’t push it down his throat this time, but she didn’t need to, not anymore.

As she picked up the basin from the table and tipped it down, his abused larynx gave up easily at the new onslaught and neither his screams nor his struggles could prevent the water from making its way into his chest again. 

Then they let him up and waited until he retched waves upon waves of red tinted liquid out of his system, only to strap him back down and start it all over again.

Somewhere during the fifth round of terror and pain, the Master’s body finally gave up and passed out into blissful nothingness. The medic turned him belly down on the floor and pushed rhythmically on his back to coax the rest of the water out, then checked his pulse and deemed him salvageable to be thrown back in his cell once more.

Oh, they had big plans for him, Emily Holroyd smirked as she went back to her office and opened the hatch to her chambers below. They would make use of this alien whether he liked it or not, she thought as she began to take off the dress that had been almost completely soaked through with water and blood. If he refused to talk, to share his mind and all that knowledge willingly, then they would just have to make do with his body for now, the moment of truth and full disclosure would come soon enough, and she would be the one to break him and reap the rewards. But most of all, she would make him pay for having dared to hurt that which belonged to her. Naked as the day she was born, Emily Holroyd climbed under the sheets of her bed and wrapped herself around Alice Guppy’s sleeping form. She would chase the nightmares away, she would make it all better, like always. She closed her eyes with a sigh.

 

***

 

Not enough to kill him, but enough to disable and inflict the maximum amount of pain. That’s how they sought to wear him down, that’s how they hoped to break his spirit until he would have nothing left but to beg for death and trade parts of himself for the faintest glimmer of respite. Even though the Master was no stranger to either end of the torture stick, he had to give it to them, they were persistent. He’d underestimated them, that had been his mistake; he’d never thought a bunch of humans would ever pose a serious threat, but obviously he hadn’t learned his lesson during the year of the Toclafane paradox. Humans were unpredictable, the more ignorant they were, the more vicious they could become with the right incentive, and he’d played right into their trap. 

He wondered how the Doctor would cope in his place right now. This was after all a trap that had been laid out for him; that the Master had stumbled upon it instead was ironic to say the least. Would he have finally seen the true face of his precious humans? Would it have changed anything? The idiot probably would have resigned himself to it as his well deserved punishment, he could never resist a good guilt trip when it hit him right in the face. He would have lain his head down on the chopping block for all of his alleged sins. Pity for Torchwood, really, they would’ve had a better chance to get what they wanted had they caught that imbecile first.

They’d brought the Master his first tray of food over two weeks ago, after the Queen Bitch had so thoroughly enlightened him about the chain of command in her little underground establishment. Raw apple and a well fried chunk of meat. Since at that moment the Master used to switch to respiratory bypass half the time because even breathing through his torn up throat was unbearable, he appreciated their efforts, he really did.

“Better eat that before the rats get it first,” the guard, Ferris, had oh so helpfully pointed out.

And, indeed, the entire place was just crawling with those mangy pests. The Master had forced himself to chew and swallow the accursed food anyway, because he still needed to keep his strength and they hadn’t fed him in days. It hurt like hell and tasted of his own scabbed wounds tearing open anew. He’d sworn right then to wrench the bastard’s limbs off and shove them down his gullet as a token of his gratitude.

Since then, there had only been hours of gruelling torture, in which they all took turns at brainstorming new and inventive ways to make his nerve endings sing with pain. He couldn’t speak at all during the first week, they had deprived him of his only weapon against them and they took delight in it, they mocked and ridiculed and stomped all over his pride, tried their damndest to make him scream just so that he would cringe in more pain afterwards. He’d learned the taste of his own blood intimately, it was always there, on his tongue, reeking of weakness and fear. It wasn’t even interrogation anymore, it was deliberate cruelty intended to bring him to his knees and break his resolve. 

They’d taken to keeping him sedated at all times, so that he couldn’t fight back but would still feel the pain, and they loved to strap him down and tear into his body, cut and burn and prod at his flesh to see how fast it would heal. The Torchwood medic would then take a pint of his blood to perform his dozens of tests, to see what made him tick, what gave him the ability to withstand so much trauma and still bounce back faster than any human could. 

He’d overheard a conversation once, between Holroyd and her faithful doctor. These basement halls had the most inconvenient resonance at times, and the Master might have been deprived of speech, but his silence was rewarded now and again by these bits and pieces of information which allowed him to know his enemies more thoroughly than any interrogation could yield. They were using his blood to synthesize a medicine that would supposedly cure all ails, and they were testing it on people they picked up off the streets, hooligans who would do just about anything for a warm meal or a few pounds.

They weren’t having a lot of luck with that; from the sounds of it, their test subjects had the unfortunate habit of keeling over after they were given their dose. It served them right, as far as the Master was concerned, the less humans out there, the better. By all means, let them be eaten from the inside out by Gallifreyan leucocytes, the more pain they inflicted on him, the more violent his immune response, and the deadlier his blood would become. 

He wasn’t about to tell them that the only reason he was still breathing now was because of the energy he had absorbed from the Doctor’s botched up regeneration back at the Naismith house. Every Time Lord had a few weeks of practical invulnerability after every regeneration – hell, during the first 15 hours, they could even grow back severed limbs! – but that usually wore off after a while as the body adapted to its new shape, and truth of the matter was this hadn’t even been a proper regeneration, just a quick patch up job done at the spur of the moment, without even knowing if it would work or what consequences there might be. And now these stupid apes thought he had magical healing powers and were doing their damndest to suss them out and reap them for themselves. Yeah, like that was going to happen.

He was disgusted with himself for being so weak, for allowing himself to be humiliated by these creatures who were so far down the chain of evolution they couldn’t even begin to understand what being a Time Lord meant. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. He would escape, of that there was no doubt, and he would take his sweet revenge on them in varied and creative ways. The Master would never admit to such a degrading feeling as panic, but truth of the matter was, his time was running out, and he needed to do something fast, before the last traces of artron accelerants faded from his system. He wouldn’t die in this accursed hole in the ground, not when he wasn’t even sure if he could regenerate again. He was the Master, and he still had a few aces up his sleeve.

 

***

 

Alice Guppy took another look around the corner before she quickly slid the key into the lock and opened the door to the vaults. Good, the guard wouldn’t be back for at least a few minutes from his restroom break, and as long as she kept quiet, he would find nothing amiss when he returned. She locked the door behind herself and strode purposefully towards the solitary cell at the end of the hall.

After that unfortunate episode two weeks ago, Emily had expressly forbidden her to be alone in the same room with their prisoner again, said something about mind reading abilities and psychic alien species. Alice got the feeling that there was more to it than Emily was willing to let on, that woman was uncannily tight lipped about her past and how she had earned her mandate as Commanding Officer of Torchwood Three and at times seemed to know a lot of things that were unusual and hard to explain. Alice wouldn’t normally question her judgement, she knew better, but this time she wasn’t going to let things lie. This was personal. This was an insult to herself, an injury that needed reparation. An eye for an eye, just like she had been taught years ago, on her own on the streets of Cardiff, long before Emily had taken her under her wing. That rule had served her well in the past, and it would give her satisfaction once again. She would make that blasted alien pay for bringing up the past, for humiliating her and making her feel weak like she hadn’t felt for such a long time. She could swear that every time that alien freak looked her way, he was silently laughing at her, mocking without even needing words, throwing her own weakness in her face. She couldn’t explain how she knew, but she was sure of it and it made her blood boil because her hands were tied, Emily’s orders had been adamant that she could only watch, not get involved in the interrogations again. But today had been the last straw. She couldn’t forget the insouciant smirk the alien had thrown her when they’d taken him back to the vaults earlier in the day. Even bleeding and barely conscious the bastard still found the strength to smirk at her like he had won something, like he still held all the cards. No, she wouldn’t let things lie anymore, not this time.

The iron door slid aside with barely a sound, and she took delight at the sorry, miserable sight of the alien curled up on the ground, wheezing from the ribs they’d broken earlier, dressed in his ragged clothes with hands and feet shackled to the rusted chain. He looked pathetic and small, just like the vermin he really was. Damn Emily and all her rules, she would enjoy squeezing that last spark of life out of him for good.

“Well, well,” she closed the door and strode forward into the room. “You don’t look so high and mighty anymore, do you?”

The alien just looked at her in surprise, like he hadn’t even heard her come in, then tried to crawl further back into the wall.

“Aren’t you even going to say ‘hello’?” she chuckled. “Oh, wait, I forgot. You’re giving us all the silent treatment, aren’t you? Turned yourself into a right mute, from what I’ve seen.” 

She took the leather belt off from around her waist and wound it faux carelessly around her right fist.

“But you and I know that’s all just an act, isn’t it?” she stepped closer to him. “You can scream pretty well when we cut you, but you refuse to say anything otherwise. How about you give me one of those pretty screams of yours right now?”

She kicked him in the ribs and got a strangled moan in response. Not what she really wanted, but then again, she had hardly begun her work.

“You see, I don’t really care if you talk to me or not,” she shoved her boot into his left shoulder, sprawling him on his back on the ground. “I’m not here to get answers from you. Frankly, I don’t even think you have anything useful to tell us, at least not anything we won’t be able to find out for ourselves. That makes you a rather useless waste of space, doesn’t it?”

She pulled her arm back and lashed out with the belt, catching the alien across the cheek with a resounding snap. He just hissed and glared at her from behind his hand, and for that she rewarded him with another kick to his midsection.

“Luckily, I’m here to rectify that,” she said, swiftly straddling his wounded body and stretching the belt between her hands. He feebly tried to push her away, but the chains were keeping his arms at length and he couldn’t move too much because of the pain. Really, she’d be doing him a favour, putting him out of his misery.

“You picked the wrong woman to mess with, _Doctor_ , and you won’t live to regret it,” she grinned and wrapped the belt around the alien’s throat.

“Any last words of wisdom?” she mocked. “No? What a shame.” 

And she began to squeeze the leather around the man’s neck. He grabbed frantically at her hands, eyes bulging out in panic and his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. Really, the sight of him was hilarious. Why hadn’t she done this from the very beginning? It would have saved time and trouble for them all. She couldn’t believe this pathetic, snivelling creature had ever managed to get the upper hand on her.

Through the haze of her excitement, she managed to hear a broken rasp coming from the man beneath her. It looked like he was trying to talk.

“Have something to say?” she laughed in his face. “Too late for that now.”

“No...lis...listen...” the alien gasped out.

“What?” she snapped, releasing her grip just a little. “Gonna beg for your life?”

“My...ship... If I die... ... explode...”

“What did you say?” Alice reeled back in surprise. “Explode? Explode how?”

“F...fail...safe...”

She grabbed both ends of the belt and shook the alien hard, making his teeth rattle in his skull. Chances were the alien was lying, but could she really take that risk?

“Speak up you bastard, or I will wring your bloody neck!”

“F...failsafe button... under the...” he tried to say through his gasps, but his voice had all but given out, she could hardly hear a thing.

Unconsciously, she forgot herself and bent forward, trying to make out the words. Suddenly, the alien’s hands came up and grabbed both sides of her face in an iron grip.

“Gotcha!” he said with a snarl, no trace of distress in his voice now.

Alice didn’t even have time to react before she felt something like a sledgehammer ram itself into her brain.

Oh, God, the pain was unbearable! She might have screamed out, she couldn’t tell, everything was drowned in a sea of pain as her mind was being literally torn to shreds. How could she have been so stupid?

She could hear him laughing inside her head, laughing as he burrowed himself into every nook and cranny of her mind, and then there was also that incessant banging sound, banging in a rhythm of four. It was driving her insane, that sound, it was even more painful than the intrusion itself.

She might have blacked out there for a moment or two, because the next time she opened her eyes, the alien was standing in front of her, out of his chains – he must have taken her keys – and she was kneeling on the ground, shaking from the pain.

“You look good on your knees, little Alice,” he said smarmily. “Time and place and all that, but think of all the fun we can have.”

She pushed herself back, falling onto her arse, trying to get away from him, but she was so dizzy she couldn’t guide her limbs properly, and that incessant banging just wouldn’t stop.

“Now, now, Alice, none of that. Listen to your Master.”

He bent over and touched her forehead and suddenly she wasn’t inside the Torchwood vaults anymore. She was six years old in a dark bedroom, cowering away from the stocky, bearded man who came at her from the shadows. She could smell the alcohol radiating off him and she was paralyzed with terror, she knew she couldn’t scream, she couldn’t cry, it would only make him angrier, and then he would take his belt to her again. Last time she couldn’t get out of bed for three days after the beating. And he would take what he wanted either way.

“Daddy, please, don’t,” she sobbed. Begging seemed to please him, he always patted her head at that, then ran his fingers over her little mouth. He liked the way her voice squeaked out when she was afraid. He always put two fingers into her mouth then and opened it up, nice and wide for him.

“That’s a good girl. Now unfasten my trousers.”

He also liked the way her tiny fingers would slip and tangle with the bindings of his pants. It made him laugh. Maybe if she made him laugh more, he would forget about punishing her, and he would become her daddy again. The monster who wore her daddy’s face would go back into the shadows and her real daddy would come back, the one who used to read bedtime stories to her every night and took her to the fair on Sundays. The dad he used to be before her mommy passed away.

Her vision shifted for a second and she could see the alien’s face superimposed over her father’s, like two different worlds colliding. The detail that scared her the most was the smile, it was the same on both their faces, the same one that had haunted her nights for so many years. She wanted to fight back, to scream and kick and scratch at his eyes, but instead, her hands were undoing the fastenings of his trousers. Her fingers weren’t her own anymore, he was controlling them from inside her head, he was already inside her and she had nowhere to run from him, nowhere to hide. He was everywhere, then and now, and she was so scared, she was so alone and weak, she couldn’t fight him, she never could.

“Put it in your mouth, little Alice,” the voice encouraged and she was back in her shabby old room once more. She knew what would happen if she refused. It just looked so big and smelled funny, she didn’t want to, it always made her choke.

But he was getting impatient, he didn’t want to play anymore, he just grabbed her by the ears and dragged her forward and suddenly that big, meaty thing was forcing itself into her mouth, stretching it so wide she knew her lips would be cracked and bleeding in the morning. She couldn’t breathe and she felt like throwing up, she tried to scream and push at his hips, but that only made him thrust harder, in and out, deeper, until she thought she would choke to death. She was crying now, tears streaming down her face and the wiry black hair around his groin tickling her nose. She kept praying in her mind to God, begging Him to make her daddy stop, wondering what she had done to deserve this, she missed her mommy too, but why was her daddy taking it out on her? As bad as this was, it was still better than what he would do to her sometimes, when he would spread her legs and make her ache and bleed down _there_ ; those times she would wish she were dead, those times she would wish _he_ were dead. This, she could still take. It would all be better in the morning, the sun would chase it away, she just had to get through the night. Bad things only happened in the dark, she had to hold on just a bit longer.

Oh, God, she couldn’t breathe. And he kept humming that same old song, _hush little baby, don’t say a word, daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird,_ one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one two-three-four! That thing was stuck in her throat, ramming down, hurting her, and her nose was all clogged up with tears and snot, she couldn’t breathe, her lungs were on fire, she couldn’t breathe! Then suddenly her throat was flooded with hot ooze, going the wrong way and into her lungs, and she was choking, coughing around the meat lodged in her mouth, fighting, fighting to breathe. And then finally – finally! – he pulled out and she could breathe again. She could smell him on her face, inside her mouth, and it made her retch. Her stomach gave up the fight and she puked all over herself, her throat stinging from the onslaught and tears springing up again in her eyes. But she could breathe now, she was still alive.

She blinked up at the man standing over her, tucking himself back inside his trousers.

“Now, little Alice, you are going to take me to my ship.”

The words hardly made any sense to her, she was still reeling from the shock, but she needn’t have worried, her body seemed to know exactly what to do. She climbed shakily to her feet and made her way to the door. Her legs were listening to the unknown force inside her mind, she was still trapped in there, watching with an odd sort of detachment as her hand opened the door and led the way forward. There was something she was forgetting, but what was it? Oh, yes, there was somebody who was supposed to be at the door. But where was he? _Damn you, Ferris, that mild laxative I slipped into your tea wasn’t supposed to glue you to the latrine all night! Where are you?_ There were three people inside her head right now – an angry 25 year old Torchwood operative, a six year old little girl and him – they were all fighting for dominance, but only he was calling the shots. She was broken into a thousand tiny pieces and she was too afraid to put them back together again lest she see the true ugliness inside her, the entirety of her pain. One-two-three-four. She would let that guide her for now.

She walked down the corridor and took the stairs two floors up, to the main Hub. That’s where they kept the blue box, in a storeroom they’d converted into a research lab. _Please, please, let there be somebody up there_. She couldn’t remember if anybody was supposed to be working tonight, she was sure she had known before, but right now everything was just wiped from her mind. She hoped somebody would...

“No, Alice, there really isn’t any hope for you,” the alien told her. Of course, he was inside her mind. He was still inside her, like a stain that wouldn’t come off. No amount of water would ever wash him away now.

Her nose prickled with a pungent smell she couldn’t quite place. Oh, she had retched all over her dress. Maybe it would be better if no one saw her like this anyway, yes, that would be best.

“Don’t dawdle, Alice, we haven’t got all night!” the alien gave her a shove through the archway into the main Hub.

All the lights were dimmed, and there was nobody in sight. Her heart sank. 

“What did you do with my screwdriver?” he asked.

She just shook her head uncomprehendingly. What was this man talking about? Her brain was too muddled to form coherent thoughts.

“My ‘sonic screwdriver’ as you apes call it. You took it from me. Where is it?” he was growing impatient. It never bode well for her when he lost his patience, he would make it hurt even worse then. She started to shake with dread. She couldn’t understand what he wanted from her.

“Useless bitch!” the man spat. “Just open the damned door.”

She was standing in front of the laboratory and she was still holding the key chain in her hand. Yes, she could do that, it was simple enough. She slid the right key into the lock and opened it.

The air seemed somehow cleaner inside, and she stood staring at the wooden box, casting a long shadow over the floor in the faint torchlight. The alien shoved her aside and strode purposefully towards the blue box. Alice tripped over her shaking legs and almost stumbled into the shadow, but caught herself just in time. She wasn’t supposed to touch the darkness, it would hurt her, it would make her bleed. _Snap out of it, this is your chance to get him!_ The woman inside her brain goaded, but she still couldn’t move. Although, now, the banging inside her head was fading away. The air wasn’t just cleaner, it was soothing as well, like the echo of a song, not the dreaded song from her nightmares, but a song of life and solace; it was making him retreat a pace from her mind, and she could almost think clearly again.

“Stop right there!” a voice sounded from behind.

She spun around and saw Greenhurst, their resident technician, standing in the doorway, gun in hand and pointed at the alien. That’s right! She suddenly remembered. The geek was still here. Her mind must have blocked that detail out until now, so that the alien wouldn’t catch on.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” the alien smirked, and Alice felt herself move in front of the gun, blocking the way.

“Miss Guppy, what are you doing? Please step aside!” the scientist wasn’t really that good with guns, he usually spent hours holed up inside his lab, never even saw the light of day most times. His hand was starting to shake around the weapon.

She tried to tell him that she wasn’t in control of herself, but she couldn’t even open her mouth to speak. But that wasn’t right, not really, she was getting steadily stronger now. Something was helping her, she could feel another presence in this room, she could hear her song. But there were only the three of them and that blue box, where was it coming from? It didn’t matter, because now she remembered. She had escaped then and she could escape now, too. She had taken the knife into her tiny hands all those years ago and cut _him_ in his sleep, she had made _him_ bleed for once, and she had never felt stronger, freer, more alive. She clung to that feeling now, drew strength from it to reclaim herself from this usurper’s grasp. She would fight back, she wouldn’t let him win. Alice put every ounce of will into this one solitary command and made her body move out of the way. It drew her closer to the shadow cast by the box, but she knew now that there were far worse things lurking in the light than she could ever find in the dark, so she ignored her fear.

It all came and passed in the blink of an eye. Greenhurst yanked the gun up and fired with a twitch, the alien ducked down quickly, but still slower than he should have in order to avoid a flying bullet and then... nothing happened. 

The bumbling idiot had missed! 

Alice felt her knees threaten to give out in frustration. All her pain, for nothing.

“Good thing you’re a lousy shot,” the alien smirked and poised himself to pounce on the other man when, suddenly, Emily appeared from beyond the doorway.

“That’s enough of that,” she managed to sound mildly aggravated as she shoved the scientist aside, took aim with an alien device she was holding in her hand and shot the man who called himself the Master all in one fluid move, and this time she didn’t miss.

The alien fell to the ground with a shout, body seizing as waves of electricity paralyzed his limbs.

Emily walked into the room and stopped next to the prone body on the floor.

“You will pay for this, alien,” she snarled through clenched teeth and kicked the man’s head in, rendering him unconscious, only the odd twitch of electricity still passing through his flesh.

“He isn’t dead?” Greenhurst stammered, obviously flustered by his failure.

Emily threw him a disgusted look that left nothing to the imagination as to her opinion of him and held up the device.

“No, he isn’t dead. But he’ll wish he were,” she said.

Ferris the guard stumbled inside the room, followed by a disgruntled looking Jonas who appeared to have just been roused from bed.

“Take him back to his cell, and make sure not to let him out of your sight again,” she ordered and the two men picked the body up and shuffled guiltily out of sight. Greenhurst chose wisely to make himself scarce as well.

Emily took a deep breath and let out a long sigh, then finally turned her eyes Alice’s way. There was determination there, and that strength that Alice always drew on when she was feeling lost, there was affection she knew just as well, but beyond all that, her lover and boss’ eyes shone with something new, something that cut to the bone and made her feel smaller than the entire ordeal that night could have achieved on its own. Emily was disappointed with her.

“Come on,” she nodded towards the door and turned to go.

Alice had no choice but to follow.

 

***

He was more disoriented than usual and he couldn’t quite pinpoint the cause. He remembered bits and pieces, more like fragments of sensation rather than real memories. He could feel himself alternating between a very potent sense of fulfilment, like something had been gained, like a battle had been won, interspersed with afterimages of pain and defeat. What had he been doing last night? There weren’t many drugs that could take out a Time Lord so thoroughly, and he had been careful to make himself immune to all of them over the years. Unless he was in a new body... That’s right, he had regenerated. Actually, no, he hadn’t. Something had gone wrong. Fleeting images of Lucy, the Doctor and Rassilon filled his mind, along with the echo of a hunger unlike anything he’d ever felt, driving him to crave flesh like nothing more than an animal. 

The oddest thing came back to him right then, a memory of him devouring himself, no, not himself, just one of the humans imprinted with his genetic code, restructured in his image back at the Naismith mansion. What had driven him to do such a thing, when the entire world and its resources had been at his feet, when he could have gotten an endless supply of meat at the mere snap of his fingers? He remembered the gruesome sight of his own eyes looking defiantly back at him with a kind of understanding he could only find in a mirror image of himself, while the Master tore into his own flesh and sank his teeth inside blood and tissue and bone that smelled and tasted of home. That tasted of the one thing he could never have. But it hadn’t been enough, it hadn’t been what he really wanted, what had always been just out of reach... There had been a fight before that; he’d grabbed one of his counterparts in a fit of rage just after the Doctor and the old man had fled to the sky and they had fought against each other, against themselves. He had won barely by an inch and then he’d taken his opponent’s strength into himself in the most savage way, by physically consuming his flesh. A fitting gesture, born out of desperation, ironic at best, since his true hunger had never been physical before, only recently had it been given this bizarre, ludicrous shape. At the end, those eyes had been devoid of light, and as he’d swallowed the last piece of his own second heart, he couldn’t bear looking at them anymore. They didn’t have the right shape, or the right colour, weren’t the eyes of his real opponent and that hadn’t even been a real fight, just an outward projection of the battle he waged in his own head every single day with himself. And like always, he had lost, because he had never been strong enough to win against himself, nor against the one who was his mirror. Damn those wretched drums that kept trying to convince him otherwise!

“No need to pretend anymore, Doctor, we know you’re awake,” a voice disrupted his internal debate, the cold voice of a woman that suddenly brought back the memory of the past weeks in startling focus.

The Master abruptly opened his eyes, only to be blinded by the glare of a lamp pointed right at his face. He tried to grimace and turn his head around, but found that he couldn’t move any of his limbs, and his mind was too muddled to understand the reason, to connect the facts of the hard lacquered surface of the medical exam table under his naked skin or the clanking of metal on metal he could hear in the background with the pleased expression on Emily Holroyd’s face.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you like to make people lose control over themselves,” her voice reached him once again, and it seemed disjointed somehow, out of synch with the movements of her mouth. “Make them feel trapped inside their own bodies. Use them however you see fit and then discard them at the end as mere shells of what they used to be.” She ran a hand almost tenderly over his right cheek and the Master could feel the coldness of her fingers seeping into every pore they met along the way.

“But you made one fatal mistake when you decided to touch something that is rightfully mine, pry it open and contaminate it with your filth,” she spat and her nails dug briefly into his skin before they disappeared altogether. “Now I’m going to pry you open myself, and this time, I really don’t give a damn whether you live or die. Reflect upon this, alien, because today I will send you back to the hell from whence you came.”

He felt the impulsive urge to laugh in her face, to tell her what he really thought about her threats and the entirety of her small, limited existence, but it felt like the link between his body and mind had somehow been severed, like he was trapped inside his own flesh with no way to reach outward ever again. One logical thought began to form tentatively through the haze, that these apes had managed to paralyze him somehow, and that it could only spell imminent disaster for his personal wellbeing, but he couldn’t find it in himself to act upon it right now, his neurons were simply unable to form the appropriate electrical pathways to devise a plan of escape. Escape. That’s what he had been doing the last time his brain was functioning properly. Before something had messed with his head and brought about his downfall. What had he been doing, trying to open his ship without even finding his screwdriver or at least arming himself first? That was mightily stupid and very unlike him at all. He had been in the immediate vicinity of the TARDIS, yes, that might be it, but the psychic signature had not been hers, and, besides, a TARDIS could never exert such influence over Time Lord’s mind. No, this was something foreign, some kind of mental assault directed at him from the outside, but how had they gotten through his mental defences? He always kept such a tight rein over his barriers. Unless... Of course! The link he’d established with Alice Guppy at the time, they must have used that to gain access to his mind. And the only person in the whole of Torchwood who seemed psychically inclined...

He hissed through his teeth as he felt something prick the skin of his chest just below his collarbones, first on the left side, then on the right, and then the pain kind of radiated downward in a steady line down the middle, like a trickle of liquid that was at the same time scorching and cold. And then he felt something come apart, and he knew he had felt it before, but he couldn’t quite remember how or when. Like a chrysalis being split open to allow the butterfly inside to breathe for the first time. Lucidity seemed to come and go as it pleased; he would have been able to tell what was happening a minute before, but now his mind was cocooned in a fog once more.

Two faces were looming above him, those of the Torchwood medic and another man he had never seen before, swinging back and forth against the light of the lamp, and they were doing something with their hands. They were doing it to his body.

“Quickly, cauterize the vessels,” Moore said. “We don’t want the subject to bleed out on us so soon.”

And where he had felt cool air caressing before, the Master now experienced a sharp flare of something that he only marginally identified as heat, mostly it was just pain. He heard a muffled moan – was that coming from him? – and a woman’s chuckle in the background, and he saw the other man wield a metal rod above his chest. Its tip was glowing red, and where it touched, a new point of fire would lance through his skin. The medic’s hands were covered in blood, and the Master thought vaguely how unsanitary that had to be. Hadn’t these people ever heard of latex gloves? Oh, but latex hadn’t been invented yet...

“That’s enough, Stevens,” the medic said. “Pass me that saw over there.”

He saw the light shine over the serrated edge of the blade and just like that, the entire situation hit him all at once. They were cutting him up! They were operating on him while he was fully conscious and sentient, and they had made sure he couldn’t move, couldn’t get away. He craved the confusion from before, he didn’t want to know what was happening to him anymore, because the sheer humiliation of it was even worse than the fact itself. A parallel chain of thought brought him back to the weapon Emily Holroyd had used on him the other night. Sontaran neural disruptor. No wonder he was still out of it, even after all this time. So that bitch had not only snuck past his mental barriers, she had zapped him with that thing as well, and how the fuck had she gotten her hands on it in the first place? Sontarans weren’t supposed to visit Earth until the 20th century. Maybe it came through that blasted Rift Torchwood was leeching on, fucking scavengers that they were...

He didn’t get to finish that thought before he felt something grate against his sternum, rocking him back and forth on the surface of the table with its momentum. Shit, shit, shit! They were sawing him open! He knew the process all too well, he’d resorted to it himself during his more thorough torture sessions in the past, he’d even used it on the Freak the last time he’d been on the Valiant, made his little Torchwood team watch while he disembowelled him and then started again after he woke up. And again, and again. Step right up, kiddies, see the uncanny self-repairing man; no matter how many pieces you chop him up in, he’ll always put himself back together. The funniest jigsaw puzzle in the world! 

Ironic, wasn’t it? Karma, as the Eastern humans would put it. It didn’t hurt as such, not yet; the cauterized skin around the incision was more painful than the sawing itself, that’s where his nerve endings were; it was more annoying because of the vibration that shuddered through his ribs and radiated through his entire skeleton; he could feel it in his skull. He’d gladly zap himself again with that Sontaran stun gun to block out the whole experience. Sure, he’d been cut up in various instances throughout his long life, but he’d never been subjected to a vivisection before. Antoher notch on the list of things that you shouldn’t try at home, children. If you want to gut yourself like a pig, you need adult supervision!

He honest to Pythia giggled at the thought, and that earned the outraged squeal of Torchwood Three’s commander from somewhere further away in the room.

“He’s laughing! I can’t believe that bastard, he’s actually laughing!” Holroyd ranted.

“Don’t worry, ma’am, he isn’t going to be laughing in a minute or so,” the medic replied, straightening himself and throwing the bone saw on the table nearby with a clang. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, leaving a smear of blood above his brow. Looked like a right butcher, only one that didn’t care about workplace hygiene very much. The Master could very easily picture all those germs getting inside his open wound. At this rate, if he didn’t die on the operating table now, the infection was sure to do him in later.

“Are you sure you used the right medicine on him? Maybe he can’t feel the pain,” she insisted.

“I’m positive, ma’am, he can feel it,” Mr. Moore assured her.

He lifted the iron rod from before, the one with the heated tip, and busied himself over the Master’s chest with a couple more pesky blood vessels that wouldn’t stop leaking.

“Be ready with that retractor, Stevens,” he ordered, and the Master could hear the barely concealed excitement in his voice. He couldn’t fault him for that; after all, he had been on the other end of the scalpel more than once with the same intentions, and he knew all about the thrill accompanying the pursuit of knowledge; still, he didn’t appreciate being some lower life form’s science project, nor did he enjoy the irony of the stunt being pulled on him. The Doctor would laugh his arse off if he could see him now. Or maybe he wouldn’t, he’d go all leaky at the eyes, begging him to regenerate, to stay with him and go see the stars hand in hand...

Aww, fuck! He felt himself being pried apart, and there, right there was the long awaited pain. Fuck, it hurt. They were using some sort of antiquated sternal retractor to separate the two halves of his chest, and he could feel his ribs straining against the assault.

“A little further, Stevens, I can’t see a thing down there!” Moore spurred his assistant on.

“But, sir, the ribs can’t take any more pressure...”

“So he’s going to heal himself like he’s done before, that is, if he survives at all. Stop questioning me and do it!”

The medic used his scalpel to cut pieces of the muscle tissue around his ribcage to allow the opening to widen, while his assistant kept turning the crank on his little torture device even more.

The agony of the whole thing was unbearable. Inbetween the metallic screeches of the retractor, the Master heard a distinct pop, signalling that one of his ribs had broken, then another one, then a third, and it only added to the roiling mass of hurt that hammered through his entire chest. He felt like his body wasn’t even his own anymore, it was some kind of foreign carcass that wasn’t him, something flaccid and vulnerable to be manhandled and carved and slashed, a pile of bleeding flesh that could so easily die, not the weapon he had been so proud of in the past. Oh, how he could understand Rassilon’s dream now, to be free of this weak monstrosity, to become as pure as a being of eternal thought. His nostrils filled with the smell of his own insides, and this time, he was the prey, hanging by the meat hook, and his enemy was going to devour _him_. Even breathing seemed strange without the constraints of his ribcage, and his hearts kept pounding in a maddening rhythm, pumping even more blood out of his wounds, filling the air with the stale odour of rust and life being drained away. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Maybe he could give himself a hearts attack and be done with it once and for all. One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four!

Emily Holroyd’s face appeared in his line of sight again, but he could barely distinguish her triumphant smirk through the fog that had descended over his eyes. He blinked once and felt two beads of moisture trickle down his temples, into his hair. He could see her more clearly now, and he could hear the strangled, desperate sounds coming out of his own throat, like a dying animal, like something broken beyond repair.

“Come now, Doctor, take it like a man,” she laughed in his face.

The two medics were prying the incision over his abdomen apart, hooking the skin on either side to keep it open, both of them in a near frenzy over the sight. The sparkle in their eyes damn near rivalled that of the blinding lamp that hung above them.

“Amazing!” he heard the exclamation through his pain, through the pounding that kept getting louder in his head, the drums or his twin hearts rising to the occasion, he couldn’t tell. “Dual cardiovascular system! Two hearts, half the size of a human one, and look, here, all the major arteries and veins, there’s two of each, like mirrors of themselves!”

Oh, fuck, he couldn’t take it anymore, he was going to die, he could see darkness edging closer with every heartbeat over his eyes. This wasn’t happening, this couldn’t be happening... By all things holy, make it stop!

“What’s the matter?” he heard Emily Holroyd’s voice somewhere further inside the room. “Can’t you take care of it yourself? I’m busy here!” Then, after a pause in which he could distinguish the murmured explanations of a man: “Oh, alright then.” And he heard a door slam closed behind the flutter of her dress.

“Look at the shape of the lungs, sir, I can count four bronchi on this one!”

“Oh, indeed, look at them go!” Moore looked entranced as he lowered both his hands beneath the two halves of the Master’s chest. He tentatively cupped his bare palms over the two hearts that were beating frantically underneath and, for the first time since the Master had laid eyes on the man, his face split open into a fervent smile.

“You are a masterpiece beyond my wildest dreams,” the doctor whispered, looking into his eyes, and that was the last sensory input the Master’s mind registered from the outside, before his vision became completely ensconced in black.

 

***

 

The Master stood atop his obsidian tower, watching the horizon with a slightly worried expression on his face. 

The rock was polished to perfection, a darkened mirror to reflect even the slightest change, the minute tremors carried over the wind. It rose from the pale waves of sand below, so high that it seemed neverending, and cast a lengthy shadow over the expanse of nothingness around it, even though there was no sun in sight. The shadow just kept slithering across the ground, counting each second with needle point precision, spinning its everlasting spiral that held no beginning or end. The heartbeat of the universe – Time itself.

He watched the gathering of clouds in the distance, blurring the barriers between earth and sky, and couldn’t help but think that times were changing, nothing would ever be the same again.

“A rather worrisome display, isn’t it?” a familiar voice sounded from his right.

The Master turned to see the Doctor standing at his side, a frown between his brows as he too contemplated the horizon. The wind blew languidly through the folds of his coat, making the tips of his spiky hair sway on the desolate background of the sky. The git always looked like he had just stuck his tongue inside a power socket. Hadn’t he ever heard of a comb, or at least looking into a mirror before going out?

“Oh, and I believe your scruffy beard and hoodie are the pinnacle of class?” the other Time Lord let the corner of his eye travel up and down the Master’s figure, pointedly, with a smirk.

The Master lifted a hand and snapped his fingers once, his attire changing in the blink of an eye to the sharp black suit he used to wear aboard the Valiant.

“Better?” he smirked ironically.

“I see you haven’t changed anything about me,” the Doctor replied.

“I can never change _you_ ,” the Master muttered under his breath, and there was an irony in there, somewhere, as obdurate as the passage of time.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, wary of following his previous train of thought. He clenched his fists in anticipation.

“I’m not here to fight you,” the Doctor said, finally turning to face him fully. “Not this time.”

“Then why?”

The Doctor took a step closer and held out his arm. When the Master refused to move, he came even closer and took his palm between his own. They felt warm and dry, like desert sand eroded by centuries of sun and wind. His face showed no expression, but, still, the Master felt a disquieting urge to look away. 

He lowered his eyes to their entwined hands and was startled to see that the veins on the back of his own palm were black and swollen in stark relief against his white skin. They pulsated visibly in a rhythm of four, and, if he concentrated hard enough, he could almost hear them inside his head, like a beacon, something calling at him from afar. Without even knowing why, the Master felt unsettled; the reason was lying just out of reach, but he didn’t want to know, he didn’t want to face the inevitable truth just yet.

“You have to go,” the Doctor told him, and the Master’s head jerked up with a start.

“Why?” he spat, clenching his fingers around the Doctor’s hand. “What if I want to stay here? What if I don’t want to go?”

Now the other Time Lord’s face did show expression, one of pity mixed with resolution, that sanctimonious mien the Master despised so much that he felt he could tear it off with his fingernails and teeth if ever given the chance.

“You can’t see what I see,” the Doctor intoned, looking straight into his eyes, and it felt like betrayal and condemnation at the same time. The Master’s chest stung right down the middle with remembrance of hatred past. Hatred present. So much hate, just gnawing at him from the inside.

The wind had picked up, he hadn’t even realised when, but now it was whipping at his face like tiny, unseen razorblades, forcing him to blink frantically against the ferocity of it all. He could feel every vein and capillary in his body straining to the beat of four, like his very essence was trying to break out through his skin. One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four.

“Now do you see?” the Doctor asked. 

And, yes, indeed, he could almost see it, almost grasp the full extent of the darkness inside. Darkness outside. Darkness everywhere, coming at him from all directions. When had the sun set? He couldn’t remember it being this dark before, there must have been a storm brewing for quite some time. All that drumming made it so hard to think.

The Doctor let his head fall back and looked at the sky, and the Master followed his example. There were thick, black clouds stretching above him as far as he could see, interspersed with flashes of blue lightning here and there, and they writhed and pushed at their own edges, straining to occupy every aspect of space and time, everything that was and might have been, in every possible direction.

The Master quickly turned his eyes away from the sight, sought the tranquil solitude of the landscape from before, but it was gone now, everything had been swallowed up by the pitch black storm, and those accursed drums just wouldn’t shut up!

One-two-three four! One-two-three-four! And with them, just as sudden, came remembrance of his own self and understanding that silence had never been and would not ever be a safe haven for him. For some reason, this knowledge only filled him with regret.

“There’s not much time left,” the enemy beside him caught his attention once more.

The Doctor looked lost in thought as he watched the last traces of yellow sand being swathed in shadow somewhere below. Only the obsidian tower stood between them and the dark.

The Master snatched his hand from the other Time Lord’s grasp with more than a hint of irritation at his former display of weakness, and he looked down at the swirling mass of black that had a sense of finality about it he couldn’t shake. Times might be changing, but there were things that always remained the same.

“What are you waiting for?” the Doctor turned impatiently to usher him on.

The Master’s lips stretched into the wide grin of the British Prime Minister he used to be.

“After you, my dear Doctor,” was his final reply, then, with a swift flex of his arms, he pushed the Doctor’s figure right off the edge of the tower into the darkness below.

He took a moment to exhale something that might have been a sigh, in another time, another place.

One-two-three-four.

And then he jumped.

 

***

 

“What the devil do you think you’re doing, lad? Be careful with that!”

Stevens straightened himself up and shot a baleful look at the front of his shirt, now soaked through with blood. He knew he should have waited a bit longer before taking off his apron. The wife was going to kill him for sure this time. He hefted the bucket into his arms, glad to see its contents still mostly intact after he had tripped over Miss Holroyd’s stool.

“Just leave it, I’ll put it on ice myself after I’m done,” Mr. Moore said. “Come here and give me a hand.”

He set the bucket on the floor, careful to put it out of tripping range, and hurried back to the operating table to help the medic with the closure of the wounds.

The alien looked ashen and immobile lying there on his back. If Stevens hadn’t seen his hearts ( _hearts! plural!_ ) still beating with his own two eyes, he would’ve thought him long dead. But that was just it, he wasn’t human, and neither of the rules applied to him, at least, not any that he’d studied back in school. Oh, what a marvellous opportunity indeed! If it hadn’t been for Mr. Moore, he would still be a lowly apprentice trying to make ends meet after getting his medical degree. Here, he had a chance to do something truly amazing. He sure as hell preferred to cater to Mr. Moore’s whims rather than slaving day and night under the chief surgeon at the hospital for a measly tuppence a week. Mr. Moore was a genius. If he played his cards right, he might even get a permanent job as his assistant here, at Torchwood.

“I’m telling you, Stevens, this is the breakthrough I’ve been waiting for all my life,” the older man kept talking while he finished threading the steel wire through the alien’s sternum and pulling his ribcage back together. “They’ll see that I was right all along, those ignorant pompous farts from University. Kicking me out and denying me the title of Doctor, just because their puny minds couldn’t comprehend the value of my work. Inhumane! That’s what they called it. Completely out of their depths, more like.”

Stevens had heard all about that particular scandal five years ago, but he’d never had the chance to learn the exact nature of Moore’s experiments back then. It must have been something truly shocking to warrant such a reaction, though, but from what the good medic had told him, it had all been for the best. He had been sought out and employed by Torchwood shortly after that.

“The secret is in the blood, Stevens,” Moore said in a faraway voice. “The ancients had it right, like so many things we have chosen to forget today prove to be true – blood is the vehicle of life itself. Used rightly, it can either cure or kill. And I am so close to unlocking its mystery I can feel it in my bones!”

He cut the edges of the metal knots with a pair of wire cutters, then he began to stitch the skin above with a silk thread, while Stevens tried to keep the two halves tight together.

“And the blood of this creature, this alien who can heal himself hours, minutes after he’s been injured, is the finest example of all,” he went on. “So far, all my subjects have failed the transfusion, and those who aren’t already dead are struggling in death’s throes as we speak. But I have faith, Stevens, there is one person out there who can take the transfer and I will find them. Just one, that’s all I need, one patient who can assimilate the foreign blood, and from their veins I will finally be able to draw the cure to every disease in existence. This alien here can actually ‘regenerate’ himself, cheat death. Imagine what we’d be able to do if we could harness that power for ourselves. We could find a cure to the greatest illness of all: death itself!”

Stevens could barely take in the ramifications of it all. He was still awestruck by the strangeness of the alien’s anatomy, would gladly have taken him to pieces and studied each organ one by one, were it not for Moore’s strict orders to keep him alive. Stevens wasn’t an expert in the cardiovascular field, like Moore, but he could still appreciate the complexity of this being before him, as well as recognize his own need to find out what made it tick.

Just as the medic was knotting the last abdominal suture, a wheezing sound came from the unconscious alien’s mouth.

“What was that?” Stevens started. “Is he waking up?”

“Perhaps a sign of lung collapse,” Mr Moore mused, cutting the silk thread with his scalpel and bending closer to the alien’s chest. The wheezing came and went once more, but nothing showed any indication that the subject was awake. “If one of his broken ribs managed to pierce the visceral pleura, I’ll have to open him up again. I can’t afford him dying on me so soon, not now that I’m so close...”

The medic reached for the stethoscope lying on the table at his right while Stevens approached from the other side, ready to provide assistance in any way he could.

So concentrated were they on their task, that neither of them saw the alien’s fingers twitch, free of the paralyzing substance he had metabolized while asleep, nor did they observe the blue arch of electrical energy forming around the palms of his hands.

Therefore, it came as a complete surprise for the two men when the alien’s eyes suddenly snapped open, and his hands that had been foolishly left unrestrained sprung up and clutched around both their necks.

“Little apes shouldn’t play with fire,” the alien spoke. “They’ll only get burned.”

And then, a jolt of pure energy surged forth through his hands, shocking both men and stopping their hearts dead in the blink of an eye.

Stevens crumbled to the floor in a lifeless heap, while the older medic crashed against the instrument table, bringing its contents to the ground in a loud clatter of metal on stone.

Alerted by the sudden noise, Jonas, who had been guarding the operating room from outside, burst in through the door to check the source of the commotion. He only had time to take in the two dead figures on the floor and the alien who sat up precariously on the bloody operating table, before he felt something sharp lodge itself in his throat, effectively cutting off his breath. He raised a hand to pluck out the scalpel that had been thrown at his neck and found himself choking on his own blood as he fell to his knees on the floor.

“Oh, what’s the matter, Jonas? Don’t like the taste of your own medicine?” the alien’s voice sounded muffled and faraway, then the light grew dimmer and dimmer around him until Jonas finally saw no more.

The Master would have felt great satisfaction watching three of his enemies die at his hand if it weren’t for the ungodly amount of pain he was currently trying to breathe through. He chanced a peek at the expanse of his body and immediately felt nauseous when he saw the ugly stitches currently holding him together and the blood that had coagulated on his naked skin. His insides felt unsettled, displaced, just like they had to feel after someone had rifled through them like turning the pages of a book. The Master was disgusted, and hated these filthy apes all the more for making him feel a stranger in his own skin.

He had to get out of there, he had to get his hands on a tissue regenerator. He knew the Doctor kept a bunch of them inside his TARDIS, he just needed to get there, and this was his chance.

He took a deep breath to quell his nausea and turned himself around so he could bring his legs down off the table. One of his palms slipped on the blood coating the wooden surface and the Master almost lost his balance before he caught himself again. A jolt of red, hot pain lanced through his abdomen and chest and he bit hard on the scream that threatened to come out.

One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four.

He clutched at the pounding in his head with all he had, willing himself to focus through the pain. He was the Master, for fuck’s sake, this wasn’t going to be the end of him. He had to move quickly, while he still had the advantage, he had to get out. If only he didn’t have to use his abdominal muscles so much to turn himself around.

He finally managed to slink off the operating table and stand dizzily on his own two feet. Alright now, he needed a plan, a few simple steps to follow, something that could keep his mind in order and stop him thinking about the pain. He was good at plans, plans were his specialty.

First of all, clothes. Yes, he couldn’t go around naked down in this nasty basement, he could catch a cold. He giggled hysterically under his breath. As if that was the worst of his problems. Focus, just focus, damn it.

His eyes fell on the slumped body of the Torchwood medic, all dressed up in his butcher’s apron and off-white laboratory coat. Well, he wouldn’t be needing that anymore.

With a few grunts and wheezes, he managed to relieve the defunct Moore of his coat and shucked it onto his own shoulders, buttoning it up as well as he could. At least he wouldn’t have to stand the sight of his own hideousness anymore.

Next step, a weapon. Right. That stupid lump Jonas had to have one on him, he always did. But the Master couldn’t very well bend down to search him now, could he? Fuck! 

Alright, calm down, stick to the plan.

He eyed a metal rod with a hook on one end sitting on one of the shelves to his left. Perfect, that would do. He grabbed the – poker? torture stick? whatever it was – and made his way to Jonas’ body, using it to lift up his jacket. There it was, tucked in a holster at his hip. The Master lifted it off him with the metal hook and quickly checked to see that it was loaded, then turned towards the open door. 

Just as he was stepping over Jonas’ corpse on his way out, he spotted the bucket filled with his own blood that Stevens had placed near the door. Hatred bubbled up inside him again and he kicked the thing over viciously, blood spilling all over the floor and mixing with the one still flowing out of the dead man’s neck. Oh, how he would enjoy blowing this place up to smithereens, wiping it off the face of the planet. Better yet, destroy this entire planet while he was at it once and for all. But he didn’t have time for that. He needed to stick to the plan.

He found himself outside, in the dimly lit corridor, and searched his memory for a way out. From what he could remember about the layout of the place - as much gathered from his daily ‘trips’ to the various torture chambers as gleaned from Alice Guppy’s mind the day before – he was currently one floor down from the main Hub and he needed to follow the corridor at his right to the staircase at the end. Simple as that.

He shuffled forward down the hall, gun in one hand and the other using the wall to steady himself along, and soon enough, he got to the stairs. The pain was a throbbing pulse spreading through his entire body, the four-beat rhythm of his hearts as echoed by the drums in his head. He took a deep breath which only made his broken ribs hurt that much worse, then he began his ascent.

Soon enough, he found himself at the top, and the wide expanse of the Torchwood cavern opened up before him, blessedly devoid of people for now. Where the fuck had everybody gone? Not that the Master was complaining. And then he remembered Emily Holroyd’s tempestuous departure from the operating room. There must’ve been some kind of emergency, and they needed all people on deck. All the better for him, then. He hoped it was an invasion of some sort, something vicious that would tear the lot of them to bits, slowly and painfully. It was no less than they deserved.

The Master took a moment to catch his breath. He was feeling lightheaded and he could see blood seeping through the fabric of his commandeered coat. Nothing unusual under the circumstances; after all, he did just jump off the operating table after a horrendously invasive procedure done by primitive apes on a backwater piece of rock called Earth. What did he expect?

Right. Next step. Next step: find the TARDIS. No, that’s not right, he had to find his laser screwdriver first, or else he couldn’t get inside the ship.

He hoped the Doctor hadn’t disabled all the functions on the thing. He’d taken great care to install a specialized lock pick designed for the sole purpose of opening any TARDIS door. How else would he have managed to make use of the ship two years ago, when only the Doctor and his companions had proper keys, and the blasted machine refused to make one for him as well?

Luckily for him, he found the laser screwdriver on one of the workstations in the main Hub ( _stupid apes_ ) and he grabbed it on his way to the laboratory where Torchwood was keeping the ship.

Upon entering, he saw a man bent over the screen of what looked like a 23rd century diagnostics system (obviously something that had come through the Rift), which was attached through numerous wires and bolts to the outer walls of the TARDIS. It was the same geek from the night before, the one who had shot at him and missed. Well, then.

The Master wasted no time to shoot him right in the skull, from behind, splattering his brains all over the monitor of the device.

He could now feel the psychic resonance of the ship at the edges of his mind, hostile and yet so welcome and familiar after all he’d been through. He approached it with the relief of a job well done. Close, so close, two more steps and he would finally be free...

A shot rang out from close nearby followed by the clatter of the Master’s gun falling to the floor. A second passed in stillness before the Master felt a sting in his upper right arm and something warm began to trickle down the length of his hand. He turned his head around and spotted another man, one he had never seen before ( _who the hell was he? where did he come from? how many more were there?_ ) holding him at gunpoint while he was making his way out from behind the Doctor’s ship.

“Don’t even think about it,” the man said. “Stay where you are.”

Oh, shit, shit, _shit!_ How could he have missed him? He must have been in the room all along.

The guy spared a glance at his dead friend over by the monitor, then turned around with a murderous look in his eye.

“You’re going to pay for that,” he growled and pointed the gun right at the Master’s head, ready to shoot.

The Master didn’t think about it, he just raised his left hand that was still clutching the laser screwdriver and brought forth another surge of energy from within him. The blue light passed through his fingers into the laser device, converting into a focalized beam that struck the other man right through his chest, leaving a garish hole behind where his heart used to be. The bullet he’d managed to shoot flew over the Master’s head, hitting the wall beyond as the attacker dropped dead to the ground.

“You Torchwood monkeys should really learn how to shoot,” the Master wheezed out a laugh, surprised despite himself at the outcome.

He collapsed against the TARDIS door, dizzy from the power drain. He didn’t want to think about what it meant that he could shoot lightning from his hands again, he didn’t want to admit that this regeneration was failing him and that, despite his efforts, he was still going to die. He pushed it all out of his mind and scrambled with the screwdriver to find the lock pick function, but his sight was blurry and the fucking device refused to respond to his commands. Its circuits must have been damaged by the power surge, he realized, and he screamed out his frustration, bashing the thing against the TARDIS door.

Just then, an alarm started to blare across the Hub and all the lights turned red, sure sign that an emergency alert had been triggered. How long before others would come? This couldn’t be happening, for Pythia’s sake. 

“Just give me a fucking break!” he yelled. “Is that too much to ask?”

He started to punch the TARDIS door with his fists.

“Let me in, you bitch! Open the door!”

But the door wouldn’t budge. The resonance outside his mind was mocking him, it reeked of smugness and spite, the equivalent of an ‘in your face’ that couldn’t have come at a worse time.

The Master had rarely felt such despair in his life. He dropped to his knees and his right hand left a bloody smear across the door as he felt the last vestiges of strength dissipate.

“I’m sorry, okay?” he panted. “I’m sorry for calling you a bitch and for turning you into a paradox machine. Do you really want to kill me just to prove a point? What would the Doctor say about that?... You brought me here, you let them do this to me. Hasn’t it been enough? Please, open the door... Please...”

And then, to his great astonishment, the TARDIS actually listened to him for once in her life and opened the door.

 

***

 

The Master was going ten rounds with the TARDIS console once again. 

He had spent a painstaking hour in the medical bay (the only room he’d found unlocked once he got inside), mending his butchered skin with one of the Doctor’s tissue regenerators. Then he’d tackled the problem of his broken ribs with an accelerated bone knitter. The entire process had hurt even more that the vivisection itself, but, nevertheless, it got the job done. His body now showed no visible trace of the previous abuse, and as far as the Master was concerned, that was enough. He was still bone dead tired and drained from his ordeal, he could barely see straight and all his muscles were screaming with residual pain, but now he was free, finally free, and had the universe at his fingertips. If only he could get this infuriating machine to listen.

He held fast to the console as the TARDIS pirouetted madly through the Time Vortex, trying to shake him off. 

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he snarled and started implementing an override he was making up as he went, trying to counteract the ship’s diversions.

He had never before seen a TARDIS fight so hard. What the hell had the Doctor done to it, anyway? Something was very wrong with this picture. No TARDIS should have been able to oppose her pilot this way, it was unheard of, even with the earlier, more unpredictable models. The Master planned to get to the bottom of this as soon as he found a suitable time and place to land. He refused to be outmanoeuvred by a machine, be it sentient or otherwise!

He saw the display screen blink on and off, showing the destination the ship was literally dragging him towards:

_September 12th 2009 A.D., Cardiff, Great Britain, Earth._

“No, you’re not taking me back there! Not again!”

He redoubled his efforts, but the ship sent an electric shock through the keyboard, making the Master jump back, lose his balance and careen right into the handrail surrounding the console platform.

By the time he got back to his feet, holding his newly bruised ribs and wheezing from the pain (the last thing he needed after he’d just finished healing them), they had already landed back on Earth.

“Oh, this is just peachy! Torchwood again,” he spat. “You really have it in for me, don’t you? Won’t stop until you finally get me killed...”

He felt the psychic equivalent of a scoff, and then the TARDIS went offline again, like it had done the first time around.

The Master spent two seconds debating what he should do. He couldn’t get the ship to start again, and all the other rooms were deadlocked, to prevent him from getting in. The only way available was out. He felt like he was walking into a trap once more, this blasted ship was out to get him, he just knew it. But he couldn’t very well stay in this console room forever. The screen showed that they were parked exactly above the 21st century version of the Torchwood Hub. The worst thing that could happen to him was to bump into the Freak again. If he played his cards right, he could scavenge a bit of tech from the base and scamper off before the Torchwood cronies even knew he was there.

Oh, well, no time like the present.

He grabbed the TARDIS keys and what was left of his laser screwdriver and went out. No way was he going to get locked out of the ship again.

As he stepped beyond the threshold, the Master never even acknowledged the door locking itself in his wake, so astonished was he at the sight that lay before him.

He was standing on a pile of rubble in what appeared to be a huge crater in the ground. It was night time, and there was an eerie silence all around him. From the charred metal and stone littering the ground, he could tell that there had been an explosion of some sort not long ago; the bitter tang of heat discharge still lingered in the air.

Could it really be true? Somebody had finally wizened up and blown Torchwood sky high? He would have preferred to do it himself, but, still, this was great!

He shoved the keys and screwdriver in one of the pockets of the bloody lab coat he was still wearing (fucking ship wouldn’t even let him inside the wardrobe to find something to wear), and took a few steps away to better contemplate the disaster around him.

“Stop where you are!”

“Hands in the air!”

Followed by the familiar sound of guns being cocked and aimed right at him.

_Oh, you have got to be kidding me!_

If there was a prize out there for most times you could get held at gunpoint in 24 hours, he was sure to win it at this rate. 

Seeing as though he didn’t want to get shot again so soon, he slowly held up his arms and turned around to see two men in black ops gear standing a few feet behind him, rifles predictably pointed his way. 

“Who are you? Where did you come from?” one of them asked. 

“Where do any of us come from? Isn’t that the greatest mystery of all?” the Master grinned his most charming politician smile at them, although the effect was most surely dampened by his ‘choice’ of clothes. 

The other soldier turned his head briefly around to call for backup on his walkie talkie, and the Master took a bold step towards them. 

“I said don’t move!” the first guy snapped and readjusted his gun. 

One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four. The Master felt his blood sing with the urge to kill. Already he could feel the energy coalesce inside his chest, radiating along his arms, just waiting to break free. 

Oh, why deny himself a bit of fun? 

He thrust one of his hands in front of him and through it, a blinding arch of blue energy hit the soldier and knocked him dead to the ground. 

The Master realized too late that he really shouldn’t have done that. He suddenly felt all the dizziness come back full force and his knees buckled once and then failed him altogether. He sank to his knees, trying in vain to regain his bearings, while the other soldier approached him in two quick strides and fixed the muzzle of the rifle to his forehead. 

Through the soldier’s walkie talkie, a tinny voice kept saying: 

_“Did you say ‘blue box’? Don’t shoot! I repeat, don’t shoot! We need him alive!”_

The man was obviously undecided as to how he should proceed, and the Master could have used the delay to make his escape were he in better shape. But, from the looks of it, he would have to resign himself to a second stint in human captivity, rotten luck that he had. He mentally cursed the Doctor’s ship, and his own body for failing him when he needed it most. 

But then, out of the blue, there came a thump and the soldier fell to the ground, unconscious, right in front of him. 

Surprised, the Master lifted his head and saw the figure of a man looming above him, dressed in a sharp suit that must have seen better days, holding the butt of a gun midair where it had impacted with the soldier’s head. 

The stranger spared one confused glance at the TARDIS, then another even more puzzled look the Master’s way, and muttered: 

“What the hell?” 

Before any of them could make sense of the situation, the sound of fast approaching footsteps shook them out of their stupor, and the strange man sprung into action again. 

“Come on, we have to get out of here!” he grabbed the Master’s arm and helped him up. 

“The TARDIS, we’ll be safe inside,” the Master managed to speak even though he could feel his consciousness slipping away. 

But just as they started towards the ship, a volley of bullets cut them off midway, forced them to retreat. They were trying to prevent him from reaching the TARDIS, that much the Master could see. They needed him alive, but that didn’t mean they were willing to let him go. Most likely, they thought he was the Doctor again. Oh, was there no end to the indignity he had to suffer on this planet time and time again? 

The stranger steered him the other way, despite the Master’s protests that he didn’t want to leave his ship behind. 

“Just leave it, we have to go, now!” the man all but dragged him along and up the slope of the crater, in the opposite direction from whence the reinforcements approached. 

The Master could hear shouting and shots being fired at them, but the darkness provided a good enough cover for their escape. He trudged on, bare feet scrambling over the sharp edges of the debris, willing his body to keep going despite his fatigue. The suited man took more than half of the Master’s weight, while with the other arm he kept firing shots at their pursuers. 

Finally, the Master couldn’t tell how, they made it to the surface and began running across the Roald Dahl Plass to a parking lot on the other side. The soldiers were hot on their trail. 

They came to a halt in front of the first car they saw, and the suited man swung his gun into the driver’s side window, shattering it to pieces. Quick as can be, he unlocked the door and pushed the Master inside, then followed him in. 

A couple more shots bounced off the hood of the car, and the Master ducked his head, while the other man was busily fiddling with a bunch of wires under the steering wheel. Not a moment too soon, the motor revved up, and the man swiftly put the car into gear, peeling out of the parking lot just as the soldiers were coming into sight. 

They took off through a maze of side roads, trying to lose their trail inside the convoluted bowels of Cardiff, and soon enough, the military jeep that had been following them was left behind. 

That earned a relieved sigh from the man behind the wheel. 

But the Master wasn’t foolish enough to think all his troubles were over now. Just because this stranger hadn’t pointed a gun at him or tried to kill him yet, didn’t mean he didn’t have an agenda of his own. From what his remaining wits could discern, the Master was sure the man had recognised the TARDIS and knew exactly what that meant. He was a prisoner again. Oh, joy. 

“And who the hell might you be?” he slurred, the last ounce of strength quickly fading away. 

And just before he lost consciousness, he caught the Welsh baritone of the man’s voice reply: 

“My name is Ianto Jones. I’m Torchwood.” 

_***_

_To be continued_

**Author's Note:**

>  _For those of you who want to learn more about Time Lord anatomy, this is where I did my research:_  
>  http://alyssa-raven.home.insightbb.com/temporis/xenobiology/cardiovascular.html  
> http://alyssa-raven.home.insightbb.com/temporis/xenobiology/respiratory.html  
> Thank you all for reading my story. I’m currently working on the second chapter, but I have no idea when it will be ready, so it might take a while. Stay tuned and feel free to share your thoughts about this fic in the comments below. ;)  
> 


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